Ada Lovelace and the First Program
Every October, Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women in science and technology. The woman it is named after wrote, in 1843, a set of notes on a calculating machine that existed only on paper: Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. This film explains what the machines were: how the Difference Engine made tables with nothing but addition, how the Analytical Engine borrowed punched cards from a silk loom, what Lovelace's Note G actually computed, why she said the engine could weave patterns and even music but could not originate anything, and why historians still debate who wrote the first program. Turn the crank yourself.
Weaving algebra
Notes on a machine that was never finished.
A poet’s daughter
Raised on mathematics instead of poetry.
A machine in a drawing room
At seventeen, she met the man who wanted to calculate by steam.
Tables by adding
A clever trick turns squares into sums.
A machine for anything
Babbage’s bigger idea.
Holes that give orders
A weaver’s invention became a way to program.
Translator’s notes
The footnotes became the main event.
Note G
Every step of a calculation, written out for a machine.
Weaving algebra
Symbols, not just numbers.
Lovelace’s objection
Can a machine originate anything?
An honest debate
Historians do not all agree, and that is fine.
Built at last
A century and a half later, the brass worked.
A name that stayed
A programming language, and a day.
Weaving algebra
An engine on paper, and an idea that outlived it.
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