Ada Lvelace, The First Tech Visionary.docVIP

OCTOBER 15, 2013 ADA LOVELACE, THE FIRST TECH VISIONARY POSTED BY?BETSY MORAIS When Ada Lovelace was twelve years old, she wanted to fly. She approached the problem methodically, examining birds and investigating various materials that could serve as wings—feathers, paper, silk. In the course of her research, which began in February, 1828, according to her biographer Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada wrote and illustrated a guide called “Flyology,” to record her findings. She toiled away on this project until her mother reprimanded her for neglecting her studies, which were meant to set her on a rational course, not a fanciful one. Ada’s mother, Annabella Byron, was the straight-laced counterpoint to her father, Lord Byron, the Romantic poet, who called his wife the “Princess of Parallelograms.” A month after Ada’s birth, Annabella Byron moved their daughter out of their London house, and away from Lord Byron’s influence. When, shortly before his death, he wrote asking about Ada’s upbringing, Annabella had this to report: “Not devoid of imagination, but is chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical ingenuity.” This was the best she could hope for, having drilled into Ada a discipline for arithmetic, music, and French, according to the biography “A Female Genius,” by James Essinger, which comes out today. Essinger writes that Lady Byron wished to suppress her daughter’s imagination, which she thought to be “dangerous and potentially destructive and coming from the Byrons.” But Lovelace reconciled the competing poles of her parents’ influence. On January 5, 1841, she asked, “What is Imagination?” Two things, she thought. First, “the combining faculty,” which “seizes points in common, between subjects having no apparent connection,” and then, she wrote, “Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.” Augusta Ada Lovelace is known as the first computer programmer, and, sinc