The Women Who Built The Internet: Ada Lovelace

When you look up the history of the Internet, men are credited with building it. But that is unfair to women. In fact, according to the website No Web Without Women, there would be no Internet without women.

Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to feature some profiles of the women who built the Internet, and that Ada Lovelace would be a good start.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace (born Augusta Ada Byron) co-wrote the first algorithm in 1843. At that time, women were usually supposed to take care of the household, especially when they were married. But Lovelace was different.

Her mother decided that she should not be a poet like her father, Lord Byron. So, her mother raised her to become a brilliant mathematician.

At the age of 12, she decided to study the possibility of flight. In 1833, at the age of 18, she met Charles Babbage for the first time thanks to her tutor, Mary Sommerville. This encounter would change her life and, indeed, the history of the Internet.

Her contribution to the Internet

Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage on the first version of the computer, the Analytical Engine.

Contrary to Babbage and his male contemporaries, she saw the machine’s potential to do more than just computations. In fact, when she translated a French article by the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea about the Analytical Engine into English, she added footnotes with her own calculations and thoughts, tripling the article’s length.

The First Algorithm

In these footnotes, she took Babbage’s initial programming to the next level and described the potential to process information in addition to performing complex calculations. In that sense, she co-wrote the first computer software and foresaw much of what computers and Artificial Intelligence do today.

She also described the machine’s limitations: It cannot predict the future; it can just replicate and expand on what it already knows. Again, we see these limitations in computers and AI in the form of hallucinations and biases.

Her story does not end well.

The sad thing is that Ada Lovelace had a brilliant mind but poor health. In 1852, she died at the age of 36 of cervical cancer, a disease that – with all the advancements in modern medicine – we have not yet been able to eradicate.

More Women Who Built The Internet?

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And, on my podcast Women Disrupting Tech, I interview modern-day Ada Lovelaces, who are changing the face of tech and inspiring you to follow in their footsteps.