Written by Diane Stanley, illustrated by Jessie Hartland
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2016
Ada Lovelace
(1815 – 1852)
Long, long ago, on a cold winter day, a lonely little girl walked from room to room in a big, old, dark country house.
Ada Byron has a wonderful imagination and when she gets a new idea, she approaches it scientifically, sketching out plans and notes. Her mother, whose interests favor math and science, is worried that she is too fanciful, like her father, the poet Lord Byron. She ensures that Ada has a good scientific education, but her imagination continues to thrive. Ada is excited when her mother takes her to see a textile factory and she is fascinated by a mechanical loom that weaves patterns from punch cards. She imagines that cards like this can be used to guide machines to do other things, too. When they go to London, Ada meets Charles Babbage and sees his machine that performs calculations. They become good friends. Ada marries the Earl of Lovelace and has a family, but at the age of twenty-four, she learns about Babbage’s plan for an Analytical Engine machine that can store results of calculations and use punch cards to change operations. Ada helps him raise capital to build the machine by translating an article about it from French to English and adding her own notes about all the things such a machine could do. She sees that it could write text, compose music, store images and even play games. To show how it could work, Ada writes the steps to calculate the numbers of Bernouli and it becomes the first computer program ever published.
Ada Lovelace has a life filled with fascinating stories and this book only touches on a few of them. She was a sickly child, who spent a full year in bed recovering from a paralyzing case of measles. At the age of 12, preoccupied with the idea of flight, she studied birds and then designed and constructed wings for herself, writing her first book, Flyology, about her findings. Her father, Lord Byron, left the family when Ada was only a month old and died when she was eight. She loved gambling and tried to use her mathematical skills to help her make smarter bets (which actually just wound up losing her a lot of money). In addition to her work with Babbage, she was fascinated with the human brain and the connections between math and music. She saw a potential in the computer that went beyond what others thought possible and was an early predictor of the computer age. I can only imagine the list of accomplishments I might be rattling off here if she hadn’t died so young.
Some of the earliest tech nerds.
Author Diane Stanley takes a fun and fanciful approach to telling Ada’s story, touching on all the ways that she flew in the face of things that were expected of her. In the back of the book, she includes a lot of information including a glossary and bibliography, as well as a timeline that follows major developments in computer technology from 1804 to 2012. There are also two notes; one provides additional information about Ada’s life and the other directly addresses the controversy that was raised regarding the authorship of Ada’s notes (and ending with the conclusion that they were indeed written by her). Jessie Hartland’s whimsical illustrations are done in gouache and are a perfect fit for the book’s light-hearted approach to its subject.
And what did we learn from her? What she teaches me is that science can always benefit from a little creativity, allowing it to expand into unexpected directions.
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