Ada Augusta Byron, also called Lady Lovelace, was one of the most interesting characters in the history of computing. She was born in London on December 10, 1815. She was the daughter of the famous romantic poet Lord Byron and the mathematician Annabella Milbanke.
As a child and as a consequence of a severe measles, the young girl spent a lot of time in bed dedicated to reading and studying music, French or mathematics. It is very important to know that her parents wanted the best scientific training for Ada, which was provided by the prestigious Scottish mathematician and astronomer Mary Somerville. When she grew up, and thanks to her high social status, Ada was related to many other figures of the time, for example, with prestigious scientists such as David Brewster, Andrew Crosse or Michael Faraday, and with the novelist Charles Dickens.
For Ada, Charles Babbage’s design of a calculator capable of performing numerical operations (although Babbage never built it) was a source of inspiration. So were the visits she made at a very young age with her mother to the most industrialized regions of England, where she could admire the most innovative machines that existed in 1830 as the “Jacquard loom”, a mechanical loom invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard and that already at that time used punched cards to operate.