{"id":7339,"date":"2026-09-03T12:08:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T02:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/?p=7339"},"modified":"2026-09-03T12:11:57","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T02:11:57","slug":"ada-lovelace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/women-who-built-the-future\/ada-lovelace\/","title":{"rendered":"ADA LOVELACE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>SHE WROTE ABOUT COMPUTERS BEFORE COMPUTERS EXISTED<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Victorian England.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Steam engines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Punch cards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mechanical gears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And a woman imagining a machine that could manipulate information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If that doesn't belong on Steampunk Australia, we're not sure what does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace \u2014 better known as Ada Lovelace \u2014 was born in 1815.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 1833 she met inventor Charles Babbage, who was developing extraordinary mechanical calculating machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But when Ada looked at Babbage's proposed <strong>Analytical Engine<\/strong>, she saw something beyond calculation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She realised that such a machine could potentially manipulate symbols and information according to instructions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Not simply numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She even imagined the possibility of machines dealing with things like <strong>music<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 1843, Lovelace translated an article about Babbage's machine and added an enormous collection of her own notes \u2014 several times longer than the original paper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Among them was a detailed procedure for calculating Bernoulli numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is often described as an early computer program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is debate among historians about exactly how we should use the title <strong>\u201cfirst computer programmer\u201d<\/strong>, but there's little argument about something far more important:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Ada understood the possibilities of general-purpose computing astonishingly early.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A mechanical machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Instructions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Punch cards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A century before electronic computers transformed the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She died tragically young at just 36.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But the future she imagined kept coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Women Who Built the Future \u2014 Steampunk Australia<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Leading to the launch of <strong>Wrinkles in the Fabric with Dr Kathryn Spurling<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We are spending three weeks remembering women who looked at the world they had been given and imagined something more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ada Lovelace saw that Babbage's Analytical Engine might do far more than arithmetic, including manipulating symbols and even musical information; her 1843 notes included the famous Bernoulli-number procedure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The ultimate steampunk computer story<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7336,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-women-who-built-the-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7339"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7344,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7339\/revisions\/7344"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steampunk.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}