0:00 In eighteen forty-three, a twenty-seven-year-old English noblewoman published a set of notes on a machine that didn't even exist yet.0:09 And in those notes, she didn't just describe a machine for crunching numbers.0:15 She described… well, she described the future.0:18 Last week, we sat down with Mary Shelley and talked about the consequences of creation, about breathing life into monsters.0:27 Tonight, we’re with a woman who envisioned a different kind of creation entirely—one made of gears, logic, and pure imagination.0:37 Tonight, my guest is the enchantress of numbers herself, Ada Lovelace.0:42 Ada, welcome to the show.0:44 It’s a pleasure.0:45 You know, so much of your story starts with your father, the poet Lord Byron, a man you never even met.0:52 Your mother, Annabella Milbanke, was so terrified you’d inherit his… let’s call it his ‘romantic temperament,’ that she pushed you into the most un-poetic fields she could find: mathematics and science.1:07 The irony, of course, is that you ended up becoming the ultimate poet of science.1:13 You found the romance in the logic.1:16 And then you meet Charles Babbage.1:18 A brilliant, grumpy inventor with a blueprint for a machine called the Analytical Engine.1:25 A mechanical computer powered by steam.1:28 And everyone, including Babbage himself for the most part, saw a very sophisticated calculator.1:35 A way to automate the production of error-free mathematical tables.1:40 But you saw something else.1:42 You saw the soul in the machine.1:44 You took on the task of translating a paper about the Engine from French into English.1:50 But you didn't just translate it.1:53 You added your own thoughts, your own sections, labeled Note A through Note G.1:58 And your notes ended up being three times longer than the original paper.2:04 Because you weren't just explaining what the machine did.2:08 You were explaining what it COULD do.2:11 What it could BE.2:12 This is the part that still gives me chills.2:15 You wrote that because the machine deals with abstract symbols, it could operate on things other than number.2:23 You said, and I'm quoting here, that the Engine might "compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." Music.2:34 From a machine of gears and levers.2:37 You saw that if something—anything—could be translated into a symbolic, logical system, the machine could process it.2:45 Art, language, music...2:47 anything.2:48 This was the leap.2:49 The one NO ONE else was making.2:51 Babbage built the hardware, but you, Ada, you wrote the first operating system for the human imagination.2:59 And that brings us to the legacy.3:01 People call you the world’s first computer programmer because of Note G, where you wrote out an algorithm for the Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers.3:12 And that’s true, it’s incredible.3:15 But I think focusing on that almost misses the point.3:19 It’s like calling da Vinci a pretty good helicopter designer.3:23 The real contribution wasn't the single algorithm.3:27 It was the entire philosophical framework.3:30 The understanding that a computing machine wasn't just for solving problems.3:36 It was for CREATING.3:37 You called it "poetical science." The idea that analytical power and imagination are not opposites, but two sides of the same coin.3:47 You saw, clearer than anyone, that our most powerful tools are only as good as the vision we bring to them.3:55 Looking back from where we are now, surrounded by machines that create art and write poetry, it’s obvious.4:02 But you saw it in 1843.4:04 You saw that a machine could be an extension of the human soul, not just the human mind.
