The First Computer

by Read Listen Learn

A century before British mathematician Alan Turing made the first all-purpose computer, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace wrote about ‘the Analytical Engine’, a machine that had all the characteristics of the computers we use today but which was forgotten until the 1970s and only built in 2002. Of course, by that time we all lived in the world of Bill Gates’ Microsoft and Steve Jobs’ Apple, communicated by email and browsed the Internet. Why did nobody pay attention to Babbage’s and Lovelace’s work until so many years later? The answer lies in the personalities of the people who developed the idea.

Charles Babbage was born in 1791 and was a mathematician well-known not only for his theories but also for his practical designs to build machines. He was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a job that Isaac Newton had before him. The British government gave Babbage enough money to build the first calculator, called ‘The Difference Machine’, in the 1830s, which was powered by steam but which started to bore him and so he never made it. That was because he already had an idea to make a more surprising and revolutionary machine that did not just calculate numbers, but could analyse information.

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, an extraordinary aristocrat who wrote poetry, fought for the poor and lived a life that shocked everyone around him. He married Anne Isabella Millbanke but left her only weeks after Ada was born in 1815. Ada’s mother brought her up never to trust men and made sure that she got an excellent education, especially in maths and science. Because Ada was often ill in her childhood – she could not walk for three years after an illness when she was twelve, for instance – she had a lot of time to study. Ada’s relationship with her mother was not close either. It seems she was afraid of her.

In 1832, Ada and her mother went to one of Babbage’s social evenings at his house. There she heard about his calculating machine and later wrote to him to ask to see the blueprints of the design. Of course, it was unusual for a girl to make friends with one of the most famous scientists of the age, but Babbage helped the teenager to develop her mathematics and took her to see industrial machines in different parts of England.

When she married and had children, he continued his friendship with her and helped to improve her scientific education – a very unusual thing for a married woman to do at that time. (Ada was not a normal housewife: she did not like her three children, drank too much, gambled and probably had affairs with other men than her husband.)

But if Babbage was useful to Ada, she was just as important to him. He made many enemies in the scientific world and among the politicians who paid for his work. Often Babbage shouted at them in public and never knew when to shut up. He fought battles with them that he had no chance of winning. What’s more, he was not interested in writing about his research. This made it difficult for him to get the money he needed to continue his scientific work.

In the end, Babbage left England to give talks about his work in Italy. He hoped that the Italian government would give him the money he needed to build his Analytical Engine and this would make the British take him seriously. But he would not publish his work and, so, an Italian mathematician, Luigi Menabrea (who later became the Prime Minister of his country), made notes at Babbage’s talks and published these in Switzerland.

Ada took these notes about the Analytical Engine and added her own thoughts. Although she was not a great mathematician, she had the ability to see the machine was the first form of artificial intelligence and the uses it might have. She probably understood this better than Babbage, the machine’s inventor. Scholars still argue about how much Babbage helped her with her notes on the Analytical Engine, but one thing is certain: Babbage and Ada were good friends and made a great scientific team. And, together, they had the idea for and made the design of the first machine that could use symbols to play with data, just like computers do today.

Ada died in 1852 of cancer of the uterus. In her last weeks, her behaviour was very changeable. Her doctors were probably giving her pain killers with opium (from which we get heroin today) and she was certainly drinking heavily. We can never know what she whispered to her husband from her sickbed, but he left her and did not return to their house until she was dead. One of the last things she did was to ask Babbage to look after her fortune when she was dead.

Ada’s published notes were forgotten until the 1970s and Babbage’s machine not built until 2002. It works but weighs five tons. If Ada had lived, we might have had the computer a long time before Alan Turing made his first machine after the Second World War.