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00:00you might have assumed that the computer age began with some geeks out in california
00:15or perhaps with the code breakers of world war ii
00:22but the pioneer who first saw the true power of the computer lived way back
00:30during the transformative age of the industrial revolution
00:37as queen victoria takes to the throne in the early 19th century
00:41britain is on the brink of an even more ambitious revolution the mechanization of thought itself
00:49forged from brass and powered by steam a victorian computer age
00:54it took extraordinary foresight and yet in this patriarchal world this visionary wasn't a man
01:06passionate and intelligent lady ada lovelace
01:10i'm hannah fry as a mathematician i want to find out how this 19th century lady prophesized the
01:24information age
01:25how she published the first computer program as long ago as 1843
01:36and how she nearly brought about a victorian computer revolution
01:42i want to rediscover the story of ada lovelace the woman who dared to dream of a world of computers
01:50and to uncover her role in a remarkable vision of the future
02:10to find out how this victorian lady could have foreseen the power of computers
02:15i've come here horsley towers a day's ride from london and her home for most of her adult life
02:26ada had a very privileged background in fact she was almost one of queen victoria's ladies-in-waiting
02:33so it was no surprise when she was married off to lord king soon to become the earl of lovelace
02:40a man who was 10 years her senior and as practical as ada was imaginative
02:52dickens faraday and the inventor charles babbage were just some of their close acquaintances
02:59it was a magical exciting time two opposing cultures science and romanticism were colliding
03:13my heroine thrived at the crossroads of both
03:16she wrote her dream of a computerized world in this taylor's scientific memoirs now this isn't just
03:31any old book this is one of the most visionary documents in the history of science a 65-page blueprint
03:40for a computer revolution it has complex mathematics it has the layout for the world's first general
03:49purpose computing machine it even has the world's first published computer programs
03:56and in it ada suggests that a machine made from cogs and cams and steam and oil could compose music
04:06in effect it's ada's key manifesto for a computer age and all of this as far back as 1843
04:18this document is a fascinating mix of science and imagination
04:26so how did she manage to embrace both strands logic and the creative arts
04:36it seemed to me that there was one man at the epicenter of everything ada did he had a huge
04:45influence on her upbringing and was the biggest celebrity in britain at the time lord byron poet philanderer
04:53romantic and ada's father
04:58ada was his only legitimate daughter and he loomed large throughout her life
05:04and yet he left her when she was just a five-week-old baby and he never saw her again her mother made quite sure of that
05:21annabella milbank and lord byron married in 1815 yet were poles apart
05:28annabella was mathematical and stiflingly conformist byron was free-spirited and cared little for numbers
05:38and the scandalous lord byron as well as producing some of the most important written works of the 19th
05:48century was famous for drinking out of a human skull having a pet bear and numerous affairs with both men
05:58and women now one spurned lover female famously put it that he was mad bad and dangerous to know
06:08annabella and byron's marriage lasted for a very long year
06:13before it eventually broke up acrimoniously and she kicked him out covered his painting with a big
06:19curtain and forbade ada for ever looking at it which must have been torturous for someone with as
06:27inquisitive a mind as ada had
06:33annabella loathed her estranged husband
06:36and went about purging the young girl of any evidence of her father's personality
06:44volatile poetic insanity she called it so she was looking for ways to try and protect ada
06:57her um
07:03anabella decided to force feed the child on a diet of maths and science with a zeal bordering on
07:07fanaticism even though the subject was seen as the preserve of the male mind
07:13Augustus de Morgan was Ada's main tutor and a brilliant mathematician in his own right.
07:26He founded the maths department at UCL, which is the university that I work at.
07:31But it wasn't exactly progressive.
07:33In a letter that he wrote to Ada's mother, he explains why women are best to avoid doing hard maths.
07:39The reason is obvious, he writes, the very great tension of mind which they require is beyond the strength of a woman's physical power of application.
07:50He does recognise Ada's talents, though, at least, in a slightly backhanded compliment.
07:55Lady L has unquestionably as much power as would require all the strength of a man's constitution.
08:09She studied voraciously.
08:14At just 13, she became fascinated by flight and designed a mechanical bird that could flap its wings.
08:26She was developing skills that were coveted in the Victorian age of engineering, inventiveness and scientific rigour.
08:44And by the young age of 17, she was ready to show them off.
08:47The stage her mother chose was one of the most sought-after soirees of the day, hosted by the famous inventor Charles Babbage and attended by the great and the good.
09:11A guest wrote at the time, one of three qualifications were necessary for those who sought to be invited.
09:22Intellect, beauty or rank.
09:26The young lady Lovelace had all three.
09:34At the party, Babbage was keen to unveil a new creation to his select audience.
09:41He called it the Difference Engine, the most ambitious mechanical calculator ever designed.
09:57Its mathematical elegance impressed the young Ada.
10:11And this is the actual machine that Ada would have seen at Babbage's.
10:22Just a small sample of what it could have been had it been built fully.
10:27But enough to understand how it worked.
10:30And enough to spark her imagination.
10:33And maybe somewhere on there still is a couple of Ada's fingerprints left over.
10:42The machine would do the work of a whole army of mathematicians.
10:47A body of men who were actually known as computers.
10:50This was just one-seventh of an entire Difference Engine.
10:59The full version, constructed from Babbage's plans, can be seen at the London Science Museum.
11:06It's a loose floorboard there.
11:09It's lovingly tended by curator Tilly Blythe.
11:13So for the first time that I ever see it, where should I be standing?
11:18I think it's nice to stand in the front so you can see the whole machine working in harmony and have a real sense of it.
11:23But it's also beautiful from the back as well.
11:27Okay, I'm genuinely excited about this.
11:28So you've got the units at the bottom and then going up tens and hundreds, right?
11:42That's right.
11:43So every time you go past nine, you have to carry up the column.
11:47Wow, actually that is incredible.
11:48It must have seemed like mechanising thought itself, right?
12:04Yeah, they called it the thinking machine.
12:07So what does the machine actually do, Tilly?
12:10So the really incredible thing about this machine is it works using purely addition.
12:16It works using something called the method of finite differences.
12:19So this allows you to take any equation and work that through using an approximation but using only addition.
12:27So in a way, I suppose this machine takes an equation, breaks it down to smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller pieces
12:34until you end up with something so simple it can be done by the turning of a cog.
12:40Yeah, each one of those cogs is just doing addition to the next cog.
12:44Adding, adding, adding.
12:45Exactly.
12:46The method allows simultaneous work on a multitude of simple sums.
12:55Tricky for the human brain to keep track of, but perfect for the methodical workings of a machine.
13:03When each addition passes through ten, these hypnotic spirals carry the one up the column.
13:10And at the end, the difference engine automatically prints the answers into tables, removing the risk of human error.
13:20Why was it important?
13:21So in the 19th century, people were using mathematical tables for all sorts of things.
13:27They were using them for engineering, they were using them for astronomy, but probably most importantly, they were using these tables for navigation.
13:36So sailors referring to these mathematical tables, and if there were errors in them, then lives could be lost, people could be sailing into the wrong places.
13:44It's an ingenious machine.
13:46It's an ingenious machine, but this was not a computer.
13:51Rather, it was an incredibly advanced calculator, precise up to 31 decimal places.
14:00Can you do it one more time?
14:01Can you do it one more time?
14:02Okay.
14:03I'm going to stay on this side.
14:04This side's gorgeous.
14:05At the time Ada saw the difference engine, it was just a small demonstration piece.
14:18For many of the guests that night, it was an amusing curiosity, but not for her.
14:28The debutante grasped its significance.
14:42The debutante of Ada's tutor, Mrs. De Morgan, wrote of the night, when most of the guests looked on with the expression that savages show on seeing a looking glass.
14:54Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working and saw the great beauty of the invention.
15:02It was enough to ignite sparks between Babbage and Ada.
15:06Not sexual sparks, but intellectual ones, and the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
15:12And Ada's excitement almost certainly gave Babbage extra vigour to push forward with his audacious plans.
15:25To build such a technologically advanced machine would need state-of-the-art manufacturing.
15:30The best engineer was hired to mill each of the 25,000 parts to exacting tolerances.
15:41It wasn't going to come cheap.
15:48But if there was ever an era for extraordinary projects, Babbage and Lovelace were in it.
15:55Brunel was engineering the Great Eastern Steamship.
16:02Wheatstone had proposed the world's first telegraph system.
16:06Darwin was transforming our understanding of how we had evolved.
16:12And Faraday, Babbage's close friend, was revealing the secrets of electricity.
16:18Britain celebrated inventiveness.
16:25But all of a sudden, Babbage shelved his idea of a grand mechanical calculator.
16:37Here at Royal Holloway, engineer Doran Swade thinks he knows the reason for Babbage's change of heart.
16:45Why did Babbage drop the idea of the Difference Engine then?
16:50The simple answer is he had a better idea.
16:52But the circumstances are rather curious.
16:54He had a dispute which was unresolved with his engineer, Joseph Clement.
16:57And by law in those days, the engineer, or the toolmaker, owned the drawings.
17:04The drawings belonged to him.
17:05So Babbage could not recover the drawings.
17:07So there was an enforced gap in his progression of his Difference Engine designs.
17:11He was left without the drawings, he couldn't work on them.
17:13Without his drawings, he then began to go back to the first principles and say,
17:17well, what was he trying to do here?
17:19And in the course of those reflections, he had the second idea,
17:22which is an engine that would vastly supersede in aspiration and capability,
17:26and that was the analytical engine.
17:32Babbage's new idea was audacious.
17:35The most complicated machine ever conceived.
17:42He called it the analytical engine.
17:45And it would define Ada's legacy.
17:48So I've had a little look at the plans for the analytical engine,
17:55and the first thing that really strikes you,
17:57especially in comparison to the Difference Engine,
17:59is just the size of it.
18:01I mean, this thing is vast, right?
18:02It is enormous.
18:03And probably one of the plans you might have looked at is the Plan 25 from 1840.
18:08This is the culmination of a major piece of work done from about 1834 onwards.
18:13And this is where he tried to present to the world the overall conception of what he was about.
18:18So this drawing is deeply, deeply significant.
18:20In it, it shows a machine that's 15 foot high,
18:236 foot in diameter, the main thing that did all the processing,
18:27and then a store or a memory, as we would now call it, extending almost indefinitely.
18:32Now, his entry-level machine had 100 what we call registers,
18:37what he called variables, 100 of those.
18:38Now, a machine with 100 variables would be 45 foot long and 15 foot high.
18:44But he spoke of machines 10 times bigger.
18:46He spoke of machines with 1,000 variables.
18:48Now, a machine with 1,000 variables would be five times the complete length of this.
18:54That's 90 feet, roughly, from the end to here.
18:57And five times that would be the thing.
18:59The entry-level machine would be 45 foot long,
19:01which is from more or less where that stand is to the beginning of the red steps.
19:07Absolutely extraordinary.
19:08So you're talking about a monster.
19:09Yeah.
19:13The analytical engine was so huge, Babbage designed it to be driven by steam.
19:20But what made it superior to the difference engine wasn't its size,
19:25but a small, ingenious detail.
19:28The other thing I noticed when looking at the plans, and you have to correct me if I'm wrong here,
19:32but something I thought was kind of extraordinary about these plans was in all of the vastness of this machine,
19:41there's one thing that really stands out that makes it a computer, really.
19:46So I had my colleagues print up a sort of mock-up version of this,
19:50and I was wondering if you could explain it for us.
19:52The conditional arm.
19:53Yeah.
19:54But this illustrates the principle of conditional branching.
19:57It sounds a complex thing, if then.
19:59If this is true, do this.
20:00If it's not true, do something else.
20:02So there's a branch.
20:03You can take one or another course of action.
20:05It's making a decision, right?
20:06It is a decision.
20:07Absolutely.
20:08So it can route its way through, if you like, a decision space.
20:10So the idea is that this stud or dowel moves forward and interrogates the space.
20:18It says, is there anything in that space?
20:19So it moves forward.
20:20If this stud, the slug, is absent, nothing happens.
20:24It stops short and nothing happens.
20:26If this dowel is present, then that dowel moving forward will activate this lever.
20:31So whether or not this is present, it will or will not activate that lever.
20:35Now this is terribly important for one is a general principle of computing that you can do branching.
20:39That still exists today.
20:40Absolutely.
20:41Absolutely.
20:42So if you did, for example, 10 divided by 3, it would go 10, 7, 4, 1, minus 2.
20:50Absolutely.
20:51And then the next time that thing said, have you gone negative, you could say, oops,
20:54and activate something that would multiply by 10 and do the whole thing.
20:57Amazing.
20:58This is a revolutionary machine insofar as it embodies almost all the logical principles
21:03of a modern digital electronic computer, which is completely...
21:06Something in the 1840 that's astonishing.
21:08Babbage's plans for a steam-driven computer went far beyond the comprehension of his contemporaries.
21:22He dreamt that one day banks of such engines would industrialise the production of faultless mathematical tables,
21:35calculated from any number of different equations.
21:41It fired the imagination of his young prodigy, Ada Lovelace.
21:55She threw herself into understanding the complexities of the machine and eventually began to realise,
22:03even more than Babbage himself, the full extent of what the analytical engine could actually think about.
22:13The mechanics, the hardware, were only half the story.
22:18The computer needed software if it were to be versatile enough to calculate any type of equation.
22:30And it was here that Lovelace would reveal her genius.
22:35Graphic novelist Sydney Padua is somewhat of an accidental expert when it comes to Babbage and Lovelace.
22:57What got you into Ada Lovelace in the first place?
23:00It was a complete accident. I did a very short biographical comic.
23:05And just doing that little bio, you know, of four pages or three pages or whatever,
23:11I became completely mesmerised by this person and the machinery and the period.
23:16The contrast was so violent and exciting.
23:20And also, they were just wonderful personalities. I mean, I just really liked them as people.
23:26Her character, did it complement Babbage?
23:28I mean, in a sense, they were very similar people.
23:31You know, they were quite literal-minded.
23:33They were very...
23:34Headstrong.
23:35Headstrong, stubborn, independent.
23:36They knew what they wanted.
23:39She liked to pursue her obsessions.
23:42When she really wanted to find something out, she wouldn't rest until she got to the bottom of it.
23:47Let me see your drawing here.
23:48Here you go.
23:51I love it.
23:52It's not exactly ladylike in that one.
23:54Why is she wearing trousers?
23:55Oh, we can't wear skirts in the engines.
23:57Oh, well.
23:58That would be completely impractical.
23:59It's a very serious hazard.
24:07Not one for hanging around, Ada went on a tour of the cotton mills of the north of England,
24:13immediately after Babbage showed her the plans.
24:16She came to see this, the jacquard loom.
24:27A state-of-the-art device that automated the weaving of patterned silk.
24:34Babbage had an idea to repurpose the technology to instruct his new analytical engine.
24:39I'll show you how it works if you come through this way.
24:48You may like to stand over there and get a good view.
24:51Now, very simply, the jacquard is up the top and it's selecting which strings to lift up.
24:57So, when you press the treadle, you'll hear a clunk up the top, but you'll see these strings lift up.
25:04Okay.
25:26So, you can see the design building up.
25:28Yeah.
25:29And we've now got a leaf there.
25:31Actually, relatively quick.
25:32Yeah.
25:33Quicker than I was expecting.
25:37The jacquard mechanism meant complicated patterns could be manufactured by unskilled workers.
25:44The loom being controlled by a series of punch cards.
25:50The punch card goes on top and each of these lines up with a little pin.
25:54Hole, the pin just goes right through.
25:58No hole, the pin is pushed.
25:59Okay.
26:00So, if you push it down, then you'll see, according to the pattern and the cards,
26:05some of the little levers will go and some won't.
26:09So, now, suddenly, whatever was on the card has been translated into these hooks moving up and down.
26:15Yeah.
26:16So, that difference then, hole, no hole, is the thing that causes something to happen back here.
26:20Yeah.
26:21Yeah.
26:22It's a kind of binary.
26:26This was the height of technology in a fast modernizing world.
26:33What do you think people were making of these machines at the time?
26:36How did they feel about them?
26:37I think a lot of people found them quite unsettling.
26:40If you kind of read period descriptions of it, you know, they sound a bit nervous about it.
26:46Where might this lead?
26:47You know, this is where you start seeing people comparing humans to automata.
26:52It does everything automatically.
26:53It turns automatically.
26:54It selects all the threads automatically.
26:57Almost like it's making decisions.
26:58Yeah, exactly.
26:59I mean, the machine is literally selecting the threads.
27:05The automation of skilled labor was controversial.
27:10A group of textile workers, known as Luddites, protested the technology would steal their jobs.
27:17Ironically, Ada's father, Lord Byron, was a vocal supporter of their movement.
27:25She had no such worries, but saw how the punch cards could work with Babbage's new analytical engine.
27:34The punch cards bring in this element of choice, actually.
27:40The power is in whoever programmed the cards.
27:46Ada was fascinated by the men making the cards.
27:51They were translating complicated patterns, such as a flower petal, into a simple language the loom could understand.
27:59Whole, no whole, the world's first binary machine code.
28:12She later wrote,
28:13We may say most aptly that the analytical engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.
28:29Her enforced scientific upbringing was paying dividends.
28:33If Ada's early education was driven, sometimes cruelly, by her mother's wishes to purge her of her father's poetical madness,
28:44then Ada's twenties was fired by mathematical ambition.
28:49She once told her mother that she wanted to compensate for Byron's misguided genius.
28:54In fact, she said, if he has transmitted to me any portion of his genius, then I will use it to bring out great truths and principles.
29:09So, over the next ten years, as well as getting married and having three children,
29:13she used her intellect to absorb and uncover the maths needed to demonstrate the abilities of the analytical engine.
29:24She also started to grasp what Babbage's engine might be truly capable of.
29:31The problem was, her relationship with Babbage was not equal.
29:36He was the lecturer and she the student.
29:39Then, in 1842, she got a chance to turn the tables.
29:46Babbage was woefully inadequate promoting his machine.
29:51And, in fact, much of what we know about the analytical engine comes from this key book.
29:57It started with Ada's translations of the writings of an Italian military engineer
30:03after he attended one of Babbage's rare lectures.
30:06And it's entitled, Article XXIX, sketch of the analytical engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esquire,
30:15by L.F. Menebrea of Turin, officer of the military engineers.
30:23Luigi Menebrea's notes were impressively detailed.
30:26But, like Babbage, he limited the capabilities of the engine only to mathematics, making for a tough read.
30:36It must have driven her mad.
30:39She knew the engine way better than this Luigi guy, and yet here she was, having to churn it out like a secretary.
30:45Now, to conceive how these operations may be reproduced by a machine, suppose the latter to have three dials designated as ABC,
30:53on each of which are tracing a thousand divisions by way of example over which a needle shall pass.
30:58Babbage suggested to Ada that this might be a wasted opportunity,
31:02and that she should add some of her own thoughts to accompany the translation.
31:05She went at it, in her words, like a devil possessed.
31:14Day and night, Ada toiled.
31:18For nine months, she formulated her thoughts on not so much how the analytical engine worked,
31:25but rather the computational possibilities of such a powerful machine.
31:30Ada's notes ended up being twice the length of the original,
31:41and there are even some moments where she seems to be addressing Babbage directly.
31:45She talks about the use of the punch cards, and even gives some examples of configurations.
31:51And here, she even writes a program for how to create Benui numbers.
31:56Now, Benui numbers are a sequence of numbers that are important in mathematics,
32:01but what Ada's done is written almost a recipe for how to make these numbers,
32:07a series of step-by-step instructions that can be read by the engine.
32:14At the age of 27, Lovelace had articulated the language that could instruct the machine to weave her algebraic patterns.
32:23I suppose it's a bit controversial to say exactly where the balance of credit lies between Ada and Babbage for this program.
32:36Ultimately, it was Babbage's machine, so he must have known how the program worked.
32:41But what you can't argue with is that this book makes Ada the world's first published computer programmer in 1843.
32:51But for me, it's not where her real contribution lies.
33:06Her notes show Ada was understanding how to unlock the full potential of a computing machine.
33:13Mathematicians see the world in a very particular way. As much as you can appreciate a day like this, you also see the mathematical patterns everywhere around you.
33:26Everything from the movement of the sun in the sky to the surface tension in the ripples in the water and the fractal nature of the trees.
33:37And Ada, as a mathematician, would have been exactly the same.
33:41But it's not just in the natural world. If she was listening to music, she would have heard the harmonics and thought about the mathematical patterns that underpin the way that the notes are created.
33:50She realised, because Babbage's machine could manipulate numbers, and the world is made of numbers, the analytical engine could manipulate anything.
34:04Ada had this leap of imagination that saw the machine as way beyond just a calculator.
34:18In her notes, she writes, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific music of any degree of complexity or extent.
34:29She envisages the analytical engine as way more than Babbage, who essentially just saw it as an enormous mechanical number cruncher.
34:39Where Babbage just saw numbers, she also saw music.
34:53For her, the analytical engine was a tool to investigate unseen worlds.
35:08The mathematics that underpin us all.
35:13She knew it had the potential to change the world.
35:21She wrote, a new and powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis.
35:33Ada had voiced the aspirations and possibilities of computing.
35:38Babbage was astounded by her vision.
35:42The more I read your notes, the more surprised I am and regret not having earlier explored so rich a vein of the noblest metal.
35:53Babbage wrote a letter to Michael Faraday in which he describes her as that enchantress who's thrown her magical spell over the most abstract of sciences.
36:08And has grasped it with a force few masculine intellects could have exerted over it.
36:15To understand how she was able to make this leap of thought, it's important to remember the inventiveness of the time that she lived in.
36:23And also who her father was.
36:28Ada had creativity in her blood and was educated in science.
36:33She understood that the numbers on the engine could be replaced with symbols and represent something other than just quantities.
36:41She was on the brink of a new age of discovery.
36:48But that's not how it turned out.
36:51So what went wrong?
36:53To really prove the concept of a computerised world, money needed to be raised to build the analytical engine.
37:06But that wasn't going to be easy with Babbage in control.
37:10He'd already been given a considerable sum of government money to build his previous machine.
37:16And yet he delivered no engine nor any change from the £17,000 that they'd given him.
37:23Roughly the cost of two Royal Navy warships at the time.
37:32There was much disquiet in Parliament over the apparent waste of government money.
37:37None of this was helped by Babbage's irascible personality.
37:46He could be a really difficult man and was constantly getting into arguments with politicians over money.
37:52After one particularly ferocious row with the Prime Minister at the time, Robert Peel,
37:57Peel made his thoughts known in a letter.
38:00What shall we do to get rid of Mr Babbage and his calculating machine?
38:05It would be worthless as far as science is concerned.
38:09With Babbage at the helm, it looked like the analytical engine was dead in the water.
38:21And then up stepped Lady Lovelace.
38:23Ada had a plan to get the analytical engine funded.
38:44She knew that she was famous, eloquent, frighteningly bright and the only person in the world
38:51that had recognised the full potential of the engine.
38:55Not just for science, but for the Empire.
38:59Her proposal to Babbage was going to be a sensitive subject.
39:04In a letter dated 14th August 1843, after a few platitudes, she broached it.
39:11I must now come to a practical question respecting the future.
39:16Would there be any chance of you allowing myself to conduct the business for you?
39:21Your own undivided energies being devoted to the execution of the work.
39:26Basically, you stick to building the thing because you're a liability when it comes to getting it made.
39:33You will wonder over this last query, but I strongly advise you not to reject it.
39:44Her somewhat presumptuous tone reflects the passion she felt for the engine.
39:49Writing her notes had revealed the possibilities of a wondrous future.
39:55One she was desperate to bring to life.
40:04But it appears that Ada had crossed the line with Babbage.
40:07He refused all of her conditions and any relinquishment of control.
40:12He said no.
40:22It's not clear why her friend and mentor turned his back on her.
40:27But I suspect she understood.
40:31She'd chosen to make her name in science.
40:35Traditionally, an all-male domain.
40:38Even her tutor, Augustus de Morgan, impressed as he was by Ada's ability,
40:45thought that she would fatigue herself with a struggle of mind and body.
40:50It's likely that Babbage assumed that if he couldn't raise the money, then Lovelace certainly couldn't.
40:53It's likely that Babbage assumed that if he couldn't raise the money, then Lovelace certainly couldn't.
41:18Women in Victorian society were not seen as equals.
41:30With her scientific ambitions in jeopardy, she came here and started gambling.
41:36It raises the intriguing possibility that she was trying to raise money for her beloved analytical engine.
41:47I don't think that Ada had gone completely bonkers just yet anyway.
41:55Instead, she was thinking about the gambling from a mathematical perspective in the way that she always did.
42:00Now, if you look at gambling mathematically, suddenly you don't really care about the reality of the situation,
42:05the noise of the hooves or the emotion of placing a bet itself.
42:10Instead, it's as though you're just thinking about numbers on a page in a kind of dispassionate way almost.
42:16So, nine runners, and the latest voting secret missile is an open-looking market of 4-1, long-awaited...
42:26Logic over emotion.
42:29Exactly how Ada had been trained.
42:31She knew even the smallest miscalculations by the bookmakers could be exploited.
42:46She was gambling.
42:48Her maths was better than theirs.
42:51Biographer Ben Woolley has researched this particularly shady part of Lovelace's life.
43:06What are your odds?
43:07Uh, eight to eleven.
43:08Eight to eleven?
43:09Yeah.
43:10So that means that, uh, if you put, well, you put a fibre on, you're going to be getting...
43:16Eight pounds sixty-four.
43:18Christopher Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe, I think.
43:23Hello, can I have a fiver?
43:24Oh, no, a fiver on Christopher Marlowe.
43:26Five pound win number one, Christopher Marlowe.
43:28Pleasure to you darling.
43:29Thank you very much.
43:31Christopher Marlowe.
43:33What does it even look like?
43:35This is exactly what you shouldn't do if you're a manager to just pick a horse based on its name.
43:40Yeah, I know.
43:41Well, that's the element of risk.
43:43Well, that's good fun anyway.
43:48So why was she gambling in the first place?
43:58I mean, why would she, why did she become so attracted to the horse races at all?
44:01Well, one speculation, one possibility is the reason that she got into gambling in this big way,
44:06was because she wanted to raise the money for the analytical engine.
44:10Since Babbage had come up with this amazing machine, this sort of precursor of the modern computer,
44:16this mechanical computer, and she'd written these notes about it,
44:19she'd become very personally involved in the whole thing.
44:22and perhaps she saw this as an opportunity of raising the enormous amounts of money needed to,
44:28you know, bring it into fruition, to actually build the thing.
44:31Was she doing this gambling alone?
44:46No, she had a little coterie of men surrounding her, which effectively acted as a gambling syndicate.
44:52People like, well, there was a chap called Nightingale, almost certainly Florence Nightingale's father.
44:58Although it's all fairly secretive, the names, it's not entirely clear who they are.
45:04There's another one called John Cross.
45:06Is that the one who became her lover?
45:07Yes, John Cross was the son of Andrew Cross, who was this famous electrical scientist,
45:13some speculate inspiring the figure of Frankenstein.
45:17They provided the money, because she didn't have access to the money herself.
45:21But she was quite a wealthy woman, though, wasn't she?
45:23She wasn't a wealthy woman, in the sense that she didn't have control over her own money.
45:28Her mother had arranged that she didn't get her hands, basically, on the family fortune.
45:34The success of the analytical engine might have been resting on the results of these horse races.
45:42Go on, Christopher Marlowe!
45:44Are you so chilled out?
45:50Ah, yes.
45:51You can have my £3.64.
45:54£8.64.
45:55Made a profit of £3.64.
45:58That was a risk worth taking.
46:02The official time of the winning haul is 2 minutes.
46:0511.06 seconds.
46:082 minutes, 1-1.06 seconds.
46:10OK.
46:11I'm going to pick up the winnings, the vast winnings.
46:14All £3.64 of it.
46:16Can I have my winnings, please?
46:21Five.
46:23It's the big bucks.
46:24It's the big bucks.
46:25What a win.
46:26There's a bonus there.
46:27Look at that.
46:28You're too kind to me.
46:29Well done.
46:30Thank you very much.
46:31Thank you very much.
46:32Were you all a bit lucky there?
46:33Yeah.
46:34Well, you even got some extra.
46:35Picking the name.
46:36Nine pounds.
46:37Yeah.
46:38But how did Ada do?
46:39Ada did very badly, indeed.
46:41She had this series of bets that she put on in the spring season of 1851, right here,
46:47on that turf.
46:48Yeah.
46:49And it went very, very wrong.
46:51It resulted in her owing £3,200.
46:54Which in 1850 is a lot of money, particularly.
46:57Yeah, a lot of money.
46:58It's probably around half a million pounds.
47:00Especially to someone who only had pocket money, really, to go on.
47:03Yeah, she ended up owing thousands of pounds to some pretty dodgy characters, some of whom
47:08were, you know, trying to extort money out of her by suggesting that they were going
47:13revealing what she'd done with her gambling and so on, who hadn't been paid off.
47:18It got very sticky for her, by that saying.
47:20But she seemed to raise some of her own contribution to this by pawning the family jewels for up to
47:25800 quid.
47:26So then, do you think that Ada had just lost the system?
47:30Do you think that she'd allowed herself to be carried away with the emotion of the event?
47:35Well, I think, yes, it was that sort of perilous combination of mathematics and recklessness,
47:41of risk and maths, the hope that she could use sort of the rational methods that she'd
47:46learned through her mathematics in this kind of risky environment.
47:51And it paid, you know, it came off very badly for her.
47:54But they hadn't counted on the emergence of an old Byron family vice.
48:07A love of taking risks.
48:11Her demise was swift.
48:23She'd worked hard all her life.
48:25A woman in a man's world.
48:28Now, just ten years after writing her manifesto for a computer revolution, her dream was slipping away.
48:36My kingdom is not to be a temporal one.
48:49Thank heavens.
48:50Labour is its own reward.
48:52And it is perhaps well for the world that my line and ambition is over the spiritual.
48:57And not that I have taken it into my head, or lived in times and circumstances calculated
49:04to put it into my head, to deal with the sword, poison and intrigue in the place of X, Y and Z.
49:11That brain of mine is something more than mortal as time will show.
49:18The devil's in it if I've not sucked out some of the lifeblood from the mysteries of this universe.
49:23No one knows what almost awful energy lies yet undeveloped in that wiry little system of mine.
49:30I say awful because you can imagine what it might be under different circumstances.
49:37Your fairy forever, A.A.L.
49:45Ada remained supremely confident of her abilities.
49:50However, the one thing Lady Lovelace lacked was time.
49:55In 1852, Ada fell gravely ill.
50:07She took to her bed in this very room.
50:14As she lay dying, painfully and slowly, from what we now know as almost certainly a cancer of the womb,
50:23she confessed to her mother about her gambling debts.
50:27Now, when she finally did die, Ada was just 36 years old,
50:33exactly the same age her father had been at his death.
50:38Her life had been full of regret.
50:47Her determination to rise from the shadows of her father had seemingly come to little.
50:53Her extraordinary manifesto was largely forgotten.
50:59Even Babbage rarely talked about it.
51:03History was shutting her out.
51:06There's one final twist in Ada's story, which I think is particularly telling.
51:16Her last wish before she died.
51:18Against her mother's will, she insisted on being taken miles away from her home.
51:37Her wish was to be buried in this tomb alongside the man she hadn't seen since she was a baby.
51:48Her father, Lord Byron.
51:51Cheating husband, poetical genius and supporter of the Luddites.
51:56Now, no-one really knows why she made this decision.
51:59Perhaps she was trying to exert some control in death that she lacked in life.
52:05Perhaps it was a final attempt at a lasting legacy.
52:09But to my mind, at least, Ada, the daughter of art and science,
52:14who struggled so much with the coldness of her mother in life,
52:18longed for the warmth of her father.
52:21Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child?
52:28Ada, sole daughter of my house and heart.
52:31When last I saw thy young blue eyes, they smiled.
52:35And then we parted.
52:37Not as now we part, but with a hope.
52:44Her coffin, adorned with a crown, was laid beside Lord Byron.
52:49Ada Lovelace returned to the shadow of her more famous father.
52:55Her contribution to science buried.
53:06It took over a century for her genius to be resurrected.
53:10It was the height of World War II, a time of national peril.
53:19Here at Bletchley Park, amidst great secrecy,
53:22a team of scientists were experimenting with thinking machines.
53:27One key pioneer took a keen interest in Ada's ideas of computer science.
53:37Alan Turing, the brains behind this machine.
53:41Now, it had taken over a century,
53:43but this was finally an example of mechanised thought in action.
53:50Turing was fascinated by how a machine could be made to understand
53:54and act upon instructions.
53:57Just as Ada had been a hundred years earlier.
54:07He designed this particular machine, codenamed The Bomb,
54:11and instructed it to run through combinations
54:14and look for patterns in data.
54:19It would prove vital in cracking encrypted messages
54:22of Hitler's armed forces.
54:28Turing had had the same idea as Ada,
54:32the ability to interchange numbers and symbols
54:35in a computerised world.
54:37In many ways, Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace were kindred spirits.
54:48Both saw further than any of their peers
54:51as to the true versatility of computers.
55:02Turing did his early work without having seen Ada's notes,
55:05but he came across them in the 1940s.
55:08Now, that must have been an amazing moment,
55:11almost like a dialogue between two like-minded people across history.
55:17Now, Turing wrote about Ada's work and her far-reaching ideas,
55:22and it's thanks to him that she's become known as a pioneer of computers.
55:26So how should we remember Lady Ada Lovelace?
55:41This was somebody with enormous talent,
55:43in an extraordinary environment,
55:45hugely privileged,
55:46with a background that made her a celebrity from birth,
55:49struggling for balance.
55:50How could she make meaning of her life?
55:52And the meaning she sought was to be a savant,
55:55to be somebody who could interpret the world.
55:57And I suppose in that sense,
55:58her accomplishments are undeniable, right?
56:01Yes, yes.
56:02She wrote about the engine,
56:03what it signified and what it meant,
56:05in ways that Babbage never did.
56:07In all his eleven volumes of published writings,
56:09nowhere does he write about the aspirations and potential
56:13of computing the way that Lovelace does.
56:15And this is not a suggestive hint.
56:17This isn't a backwards projection from our own age
56:20onto the blank canvas of the past.
56:22This is Lovelace thumping the table,
56:24saying,
56:25this is what is significant about this machine.
56:31The modern world now teems with computers.
56:34They're everywhere,
56:35often hidden as miniaturised microchips.
56:41If we don't take them totally for granted,
56:43we certainly aren't surprised that they can do so much more
56:47than simple number crunching.
56:50Ada had seen this,
56:52the extraordinary flexibility of computers,
56:55nearly 200 years ago.
57:00It would have been quite something,
57:01a Victorian information age,
57:04with hardware driven by steam,
57:07and software with the power to unpick the fabric of reality,
57:11dreamt up by Ada Lovelace.
57:15They also read a pop to our eye and society's
57:30record hangar.
57:32They read the designs and do-
57:34they grab the top hangar.
57:37They need to repent.
57:39Inies, they're not equipped with such greatils.
57:40They also present the thought hangar.