Ada Lovelace Picture Book

Prepared by the Cronegeek - April 2010For the Women and Computer Class

at St. Cloud State University

DRAFT: To illustrate use of PowerPoint to make a picture book – like the classic children’s Golden Book series.

Last three slides illustrate mistakes to be avoided when enlarging images.

Ada Lovelace

1815 – 1852

First ComputerProgrammer

Ada was born in 1815 in Marleybone, which is part of London. This map shows how Marleybone is near famous places like Hyde Park and the zoo in Regent’s Park

Ada Lovelace lived during the time when the first railroads were being built. Here is a map of the railroads in southern England around 1840. Ada could take the train from London to Southampton or Dover and then take a boat to France.

Ada’s mother did not want her to become an impractical poet like her father Lord Byron.

So Ada had lots of math tutors and grew to love mathematics.

Ada and her friend Mary Somerville loved to attend science demonstrations together.

One day Ada met George Babbage who had written a description of an Analytical Engine which would perform math operations and calculations.

Mary was fascinated and years later wrote the first program for this machine – a forerunner of the modern computer.

Charles Babbage – Replace Human Calculations with a Machine

Charles Babbage, an English “gentleman scientist” grew increasingly frustrated with all the errors he discovered in a book of astronomical tables and declared,

“ I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.”

His frustration at all the time-wasting and error-prone hand calculations led him to develop plans for an Analytical Engine – a machine which would perform mathematical calculations.

Ada worked from Babbage’s Analytical Engine to develop a program to calculate Bernoulli numbers. This is a page from an academic journal of 1823 describing Babbage’s machine.

From an 1823 academic journal describing Babbage’s Analytical Engine – a very early design for what we today would call a computer.

Ada wrote a step-by-step description of the operations that could be performed with punch cards to calculate the Bernoulli numbers.

This step by step approach is what we call programming, so Ada is known as the first programmer.

“Ada met Babbage at a party in 1833 when she was seventeen and was entranced when Babbage demonstrated the small working section of the Engine to her.” according to the Computer History Museum web site.

Ada Lovelace has been called the “prophet of the computer age.” She foresaw many possibilities besides math for Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Ada speculated that “the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

Ada Lovelace – Prophet of the Computer Age

Source: Computer History Museum

Today we can use software like Cakewalk Music Creator and the virtual keyboard to compose music on the computer – just like Ada Lovelace predicted.

What Happens When Enlarge Pic Too Much?Original Pic at Original Size

What Happens When Enlarge Pic Too Much?Here Original Pic Enlarged to full Height of Slide

What Happens When Enlarge Pic Too Much?Enlarged Manually to Completely Fill Screen –

Distorting Width