Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage

In 1833 Ada Lovelace was working with her mentor Mary Sommerville, who introduced her to Charles Babbage. Babbage was a Lucasian Professor of Mathematics who had already attained considerable celebrity for his visionary and perpetually unfinished plans for gigantic clockwork calculating machines. Babbage spoke excitedly of an invention he called the “Difference Machine,” a tower of numbered wheels that could make reliable calculations with the turn of a handle.

Lovelace was deeply intrigued by Babbage’s plans for a tremendously complicated device he called the Analytical Engine, which was to combine the array of adding gears of his earlier Difference Engine with an elaborate punchcard operating system. It was never built, but the design had all the essential elements of a modern computer.

Babbage's Analytical Engine

Blueprints detailing just one small part of the Analytical Engine.

After their initial meeting, Babbage invited Ada to view a demonstration of his prototype difference machine at his home. He and Ada then started a correspondence about the machine, as Ada was intrigued by the concept of the machine and was able to offer her own mathematical studies as assistance to his work. The letters between them span from June 10, 1835, to August 12, 1852. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace both had somewhat unconventional personalities and became close and lifelong friends. Babbage described her as “that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects could have exerted over it,” or an another occasion, as “The Enchantress of Numbers”.

Geni, Difference Engine constructed by the Science Museum based on the plans for Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2, Wikipedia

Sydney Padua, The Lovelace Adventures Pt. 2

David Greaves, Diagram of Babbage's Analytical Engine