1815 – 1852England
Ada Lovelace
A machine can follow a recipe, and the recipe can be poetry.
A short story
She wrote what is now called the first computer program: a step-by-step recipe for a machine that was never actually finished in her lifetime. Her recipe taught the machine to calculate a famous sequence of numbers that turn up in calculus. She also imagined that one day, machines like it could compose music and paint pictures, long before anyone built one.
In their own words
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.
Lovelace, Notes on the Analytical Engine, Note G, 1843.
The lab their idea turned into
Slope Lab
Look closely at one point of a curve. What slope do you see?
Open Slope Lab →