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12,100 | Lord Byron expected his child to be a "glorious boy" and was disappointed when Lady Byron gave birth to a girl. The child was named after Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and was called "Ada" by Byron himself. On 16 January 1816, at Lord Byron's command, Lady Byron left for her parents' home at Kirkby Mallory, taking their five-week-old daughter with her. Although English law at the time granted full custody of children to the father in cases of separation, Lord Byron made no attempt to claim his parental rights, but did request that his sister keep him informed of Ada's welfare. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,101 | On 21 April, Lord Byron signed the deed of separation, although very reluctantly, and left England for good a few days later. Aside from an acrimonious separation, Lady Byron continued throughout her life to make allegations about her husband's immoral behaviour. This set of events made Lovelace infamous in Victorian society. Ada did not have a relationship with her father. He died in 1824 when she was eight years old. Her mother was the only significant parental figure in her life. Lovelace was not shown the family portrait of her father until her 20th birthday. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,102 | Lovelace did not have a close relationship with her mother. She was often left in the care of her maternal grandmother Judith, Hon. Lady Milbanke, who doted on her. However, because of societal attitudes of the time—which favoured the husband in any separation, with the welfare of any child acting as mitigation—Lady Byron had to present herself as a loving mother to the rest of society. This included writing anxious letters to Lady Milbanke about her daughter's welfare, with a cover note saying to retain the letters in case she had to use them to show maternal concern. In one letter to Lady Milbanke, she referred to her daughter as "it": "I talk to it for your satisfaction, not my own, and shall be very glad when you have it under your own." Lady Byron had her teenage daughter watched by close friends for any sign of moral deviation. Lovelace dubbed these observers the "Furies" and later complained they exaggerated and invented stories about her. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,103 | Lovelace was often ill, beginning in early childhood. At the age of eight, she experienced headaches that obscured her vision. In June 1829, she was paralyzed after a bout of measles. She was subjected to continuous bed rest for nearly a year, something which may have extended her period of disability. By 1831, she was able to walk with crutches. Despite the illnesses, she developed her mathematical and technological skills. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,104 | Ada Byron had an affair with a tutor in early 1833. She tried to elope with him after she was caught, but the tutor's relatives recognised her and contacted her mother. Lady Byron and her friends covered the incident up to prevent a public scandal. Lovelace never met her younger half-sister, Allegra, the daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont. Allegra died in 1822 at the age of five. Lovelace did have some contact with Elizabeth Medora Leigh, the daughter of Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh, who purposely avoided Lovelace as much as possible when introduced at court. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,105 | Lovelace became close friends with her tutor Mary Somerville, who introduced her to Charles Babbage in 1833. She had a strong respect and affection for Somerville, and they corresponded for many years. Other acquaintances included the scientists Andrew Crosse, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday and the author Charles Dickens. She was presented at Court at the age of seventeen "and became a popular belle of the season" in part because of her "brilliant mind". By 1834 Ada was a regular at Court and started attending various events. She danced often and was able to charm many people, and was described by most people as being dainty, although John Hobhouse, Byron's friend, described her as "a large, coarse-skinned young woman but with something of my friend's features, particularly the mouth". This description followed their meeting on 24 February 1834 in which Ada made it clear to Hobhouse that she did not like him, probably due to her mother's influence, which led her to dislike all of her father's friends. This first impression was not to last, and they later became friends. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,106 | On 8 July 1835, she married William, 8th Baron King, becoming Lady King. They had three homes: Ockham Park, Surrey; a Scottish estate on Loch Torridon in Ross-shire; and a house in London. They spent their honeymoon at Worthy Manor in Ashley Combe near Porlock Weir, Somerset. The Manor had been built as a hunting lodge in 1799 and was improved by King in preparation for their honeymoon. It later became their summer retreat and was further improved during this time. From 1845, the family's main house was Horsley Towers, built in the Tudorbethan fashion by the architect of the Houses of Parliament, Charles Barry, and later greatly enlarged to Lovelace's own designs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,107 | They had three children: Byron (born 1836); Anne Isabella (called Annabella, born 1837); and Ralph Gordon (born 1839). Immediately after the birth of Annabella, Lady King experienced "a tedious and suffering illness, which took months to cure". Ada was a descendant of the extinct Barons Lovelace and in 1838, her husband was made Earl of Lovelace and Viscount Ockham, meaning Ada became the Countess of Lovelace. In 1843–44, Ada's mother assigned William Benjamin Carpenter to teach Ada's children and to act as a "moral" instructor for Ada. He quickly fell for her and encouraged her to express any frustrated affections, claiming that his marriage meant he would never act in an "unbecoming" manner. When it became clear that Carpenter was trying to start an affair, Ada cut it off. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,108 | In 1841, Lovelace and Medora Leigh (the daughter of Lord Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh) were told by Ada's mother that Ada's father was also Medora's father. On 27 February 1841, Ada wrote to her mother: "I am not in the least "astonished". In fact, you merely "confirm" what I have for "years and years" felt scarcely a doubt about, but should have considered it most improper in me to hint to you that I in any way suspected." She did not blame the incestuous relationship on Byron, but instead blamed Augusta Leigh: "I fear she is more inherently wicked than he ever was." In the 1840s, Ada flirted with scandals: firstly, from a relaxed approach to extra-marital relationships with men, leading to rumours of affairs; and secondly, from her love of gambling. She apparently lost more than £3,000 on the horses during the later 1840s. The gambling led to her forming a syndicate with male friends, and an ambitious attempt in 1851 to create a mathematical model for successful large bets. This went disastrously wrong, leaving her thousands of pounds in debt to the syndicate, forcing her to admit it all to her husband. She had a shadowy relationship with Andrew Crosse's son John from 1844 onwards. John Crosse destroyed most of their correspondence after her death as part of a legal agreement. She bequeathed him the only heirlooms her father had personally left to her. During her final illness, she would panic at the idea of the younger Crosse being kept from visiting her. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,109 | From 1832, when she was seventeen, her mathematical abilities began to emerge, and her interest in mathematics dominated the majority of her adult life. Her mother's obsession with rooting out any of the insanity of which she accused Byron was one of the reasons that Ada was taught mathematics from an early age. She was privately educated in mathematics and science by William Frend, William King, and Mary Somerville, the noted 19th-century researcher and scientific author. In the 1840s, the mathematician Augustus De Morgan extended her "much help in her mathematical studies" including study of advanced calculus topics including the "numbers of Bernoulli" (that formed her celebrated algorithm for Babbage's Analytical Engine). In a letter to Lady Byron, De Morgan suggested that Ada's skill in mathematics might lead her to become "an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,110 | Lovelace often questioned basic assumptions through integrating poetry and science. Whilst studying differential calculus, she wrote to De Morgan: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,111 | I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected and to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I am often reminded of certain sprites and fairies one reads of, who are at one's elbows in "one" shape now, and the next minute in a form most dissimilar. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,112 | Lovelace believed that intuition and imagination were critical to effectively applying mathematical and scientific concepts. She valued metaphysics as much as mathematics, viewing both as tools for exploring "the unseen worlds around us". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,113 | Lovelace died at the age of 36 on 27 November 1852, from uterine cancer. The illness lasted several months, in which time Annabella took command over whom Ada saw, and excluded all of her friends and confidants. Under her mother's influence, Ada had a religious transformation and was coaxed into repenting of her previous conduct and making Annabella her executor. She lost contact with her husband after confessing something to him on 30 August which caused him to abandon her bedside. It is not known what she told him. She was buried, at her request, next to her father at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire. A memorial plaque, written in Latin, to her and her father is in the chapel attached to Horsley Towers. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,114 | Throughout her life, Lovelace was strongly interested in scientific developments and fads of the day, including phrenology and mesmerism. After her work with Babbage, Lovelace continued to work on other projects. In 1844, she commented to a friend Woronzow Greig about her desire to create a mathematical model for how the brain gives rise to thoughts and nerves to feelings ("a calculus of the nervous system"). She never achieved this, however. In part, her interest in the brain came from a long-running pre-occupation, inherited from her mother, about her "potential" madness. As part of her research into this project, she visited the electrical engineer Andrew Crosse in 1844 to learn how to carry out electrical experiments. In the same year, she wrote a review of a paper by Baron Karl von Reichenbach, "Researches on Magnetism", but this was not published and does not appear to have progressed past the first draft. In 1851, the year before her cancer struck, she wrote to her mother mentioning "certain productions" she was working on regarding the relation of maths and music. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,115 | Lovelace first met Charles Babbage in June 1833, through their mutual friend Mary Somerville. Later that month, Babbage invited Lovelace to see the prototype for his difference engine. She became fascinated with the machine and used her relationship with Somerville to visit Babbage as often as she could. Babbage was impressed by Lovelace's intellect and analytic skills. He called her "The Enchantress of Number". In 1843, he wrote to her: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,116 | During a nine-month period in 1842–43, Lovelace translated the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea's article on Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes. Explaining the Analytical Engine's function was a difficult task; many other scientists did not grasp the concept and the British establishment had shown little interest in it. Lovelace's notes even had to explain how the Analytical Engine differed from the original Difference Engine. Her work was well received at the time; the scientist Michael Faraday described himself as a supporter of her writing. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,117 | The notes are around three times longer than the article itself and include (in "Note G"), in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine, which might have run correctly had it ever been built (only Babbage's Difference Engine has been built, completed in London in 2002). Based on this work, Lovelace is now considered by many to be the first computer programmer and her method has been called the world's first computer program. Others dispute this because some of Charles Babbage's earlier writings could be considered computer programs. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,118 | "Note G" also contains Lovelace's dismissal of artificial intelligence. She wrote that "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to "originate" anything. It can do "whatever we know how to order it" to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths." This objection has been the subject of much debate and rebuttal, for example by Alan Turing in his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". Most modern computer scientists argue that this view is outdated and that computer software can develop in ways that cannot necessarily be anticipated by programmers. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,119 | Lovelace and Babbage had a minor falling out when the papers were published, when he tried to leave his own statement (criticising the government's treatment of his Engine) as an unsigned preface, which could have been mistakenly interpreted as a joint declaration. When Taylor's "Scientific Memoirs" ruled that the statement should be signed, Babbage wrote to Lovelace asking her to withdraw the paper. This was the first that she knew he was leaving it unsigned, and she wrote back refusing to withdraw the paper. The historian Benjamin Woolley theorised that "His actions suggested he had so enthusiastically sought Ada's involvement, and so happily indulged her ... because of her 'celebrated name'." Their friendship recovered, and they continued to correspond. On 12 August 1851, when she was dying of cancer, Lovelace wrote to him asking him to be her executor, though this letter did not give him the necessary legal authority. Part of the terrace at Worthy Manor was known as "Philosopher's Walk;" it was there that Lovelace and Babbage were reputed to have walked while discussing mathematical principles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,120 | In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer and the future Prime Minister of Italy, transcribed Babbage's lecture into French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the "Bibliothèque universelle de Genève" in October 1842. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,121 | Babbage's friend Charles Wheatstone commissioned Ada Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English. She then augmented the paper with notes, which were added to the translation. Ada Lovelace spent the better part of a year doing this, assisted with input from Babbage. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in the September 1843 edition of Taylor's "Scientific Memoirs" under the initialism "AAL". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,122 | Ada Lovelace's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered to be the first published algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and Ada Lovelace has often been cited as the first computer programmer for this reason. The engine was never completed and so her program was never tested. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,123 | In 1953, more than a century after her death, Ada Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished as an appendix to B. V. Bowden's "Faster than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines". The engine has now been recognised as an early model for a computer and her notes as a description of a computer and software. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,124 | In her notes, Ada Lovelace emphasised the difference between the Analytical Engine and previous calculating machines, particularly its ability to be programmed to solve problems of any complexity. She realised the potential of the device extended far beyond mere number crunching. In her notes, she wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,125 | This analysis was an important development from previous ideas about the capabilities of computing devices and anticipated the implications of modern computing one hundred years before they were realised. Walter Isaacson ascribes Ada's insight regarding the application of computing to "any" process based on logical symbols to an observation about textiles: "When she saw some mechanical looms that used punchcards to direct the weaving of beautiful patterns, it reminded her of how Babbage's engine used punched cards to make calculations." This insight is seen as significant by writers such as Betty Toole and Benjamin Woolley, as well as the programmer John Graham-Cumming, whose project Plan 28 has the aim of constructing the first complete Analytical Engine. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,126 | Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see. In Babbage's world his engines were bound by number...What Lovelace saw...was that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules. It is this fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine for manipulating symbols according to rules that is the fundamental transition from calculation to computation—to general-purpose computation—and looking back from the present high ground of modern computing, if we are looking and sifting history for that transition, then that transition was made explicitly by Ada in that 1843 paper. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,127 | Lovelace recognized the difference between the details of the computing mechanism, as covered in a 1934 article on the Difference Engine, | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,128 | and the logical structure of the Analytical Engine, on which the article she was reviewing dwelt. She noted that different specialists might be required in each area. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,129 | The [1934 article] chiefly treats it under its mechanical aspect, entering but slightly into the mathematical principles of which that engine is the representative, but giving, in considerable length, many details of the mechanism and contrivances by means of which it tabulates the various orders of differences. M. Menabrea, on the contrary, exclusively developes the analytical view; taking it for granted that mechanism is able to perform certain processes, but without attempting to explain how; and devoting his whole attention to explanations and illustrations of the manner in which analytical laws can be so arranged and combined as to bring every branch of that vast subject within the grasp of the assumed powers of mechanism. It is obvious that, in the invention of a calculating engine, these two branches of the subject are equally essential fields of investigation... They are indissolubly connected, though so different in their intrinsic nature, that perhaps the same mind might not be likely to prove equally profound or successful in both. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,130 | Though Lovelace is often referred to as the first computer programmer, some biographers, computer scientists and historians of computing claim otherwise. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,131 | Bruce Collier, who later wrote a biography of Babbage, wrote in his 1970 Harvard University PhD thesis that Lovelace "made a considerable contribution to publicizing the Analytical Engine, but there is no evidence that she advanced the design or theory of it in any way". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,132 | Eugene Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra Toole consider it "incorrect" to regard Lovelace as the first computer programmer, as Babbage wrote the initial programs for his Analytical Engine, although the majority were never published. Bromley notes several dozen sample programs prepared by Babbage between 1837 and 1840, all substantially predating Lovelace's notes. Dorothy K. Stein regards Lovelace's notes as "more a reflection of the mathematical uncertainty of the author, the political purposes of the inventor, and, above all, of the social and cultural context in which it was written, than a blueprint for a scientific development". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,133 | Doron Swade, a specialist on history of computing known for his work on Babbage, discussed Lovelace during a lecture on Babbage's analytical engine. He explained that Ada was only a "promising beginner" instead of genius in mathematics, that she began studying basic concepts of mathematics five years after Babbage conceived the analytical engine so she could not have made important contributions to it, and that she only published the first computer program instead of actually writing it. But he agrees that Ada was the only person to see the potential of the analytical engine as a machine capable of expressing entities other than quantities. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,134 | In his book, "Idea Makers", Stephen Wolfram defends Lovelace's contributions. While acknowledging that Babbage wrote several unpublished algorithms for the Analytical Engine prior to Lovelace's notes, Wolfram argues that "there's nothing as sophisticated—or as clean—as Ada's computation of the Bernoulli numbers. Babbage certainly helped and commented on Ada's work, but she was definitely the driver of it." Wolfram then suggests that Lovelace's main achievement was to distill from Babbage's correspondence "a clear exposition of the abstract operation of the machine—something which Babbage never did". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,135 | Lord Byron wrote the poem "Fare Thee Well" to his wife Lady Byron in 1816, following their separation after the birth of Ada Lovelace. In the poem he writes: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,136 | In the 1990 steampunk novel "The Difference Engine" by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Lovelace delivers a lecture on the "punched cards" programme which proves Gödel's incompleteness theorems decades before their actual discovery. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,137 | In the 1997 film "Conceiving Ada," a computer scientist obsessed with Ada finds a way of communicating with her in the past by means of "undying information waves". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,138 | In Tom Stoppard's 1993 play "Arcadia", the precocious teenage genius Thomasina Coverly—a character "apparently based" on Ada Lovelace (the play also involves Lord Byron)—comes to understand chaos theory, and theorises the second law of thermodynamics, before either is officially recognised. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,139 | Lovelace features in John Crowley's 2005 novel, "Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land", as an unseen character whose personality is forcefully depicted in her annotations and anti-heroic efforts to archive her father's lost novel. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,140 | The 2015 play "Ada and the Engine" by Lauren Gunderson portrays Lovelace and Charles Babbage in unrequited love, and it imagines a post-death meeting between Lovelace and her father. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,141 | Lovelace and Babbage are the main characters in Sydney Padua's webcomic and graphic novel "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage". The comic features extensive footnotes on the history of Ada Lovelace, and many lines of dialogue are drawn from actual correspondence. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,142 | Lovelace and Mary Shelley as teenagers are the central characters in Jordan Stratford's steampunk series, "The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,143 | Lovelace, identified as Ada Augusta Byron, is portrayed by Lily Lesser in the second season of "The Frankenstein Chronicles". She is employed as an "analyst" to provide the workings of a life-sized humanoid automaton. The brass workings of the machine are reminiscent of Babbage's analytical engine. Her employment is described as keeping her occupied until she returns to her studies in advanced mathematics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,144 | Lovelace and Babbage appear as characters in the second season of the ITV series "Victoria" (2017). Emerald Fennell portrays Lovelace in the episode, "The Green-Eyed Monster." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,145 | The Cardano cryptocurrency platform, which was launched in 2017, uses Ada as the name for their cryptocurrency and Lovelace as the smallest sub-unit of an Ada. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,146 | "Lovelace" is the name given to the operating system designed by the character Cameron Howe in "Halt and Catch Fire". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,147 | Lovelace is a primary character in the 2019 Big Finish Doctor Who audio play "The Enchantress of Numbers," starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor and Jane Slavin as his current companion, WPC Ann Kelso. Lovelace is played by Finty Williams. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,148 | In 2019, Lovelace is a featured character in the play STEM FEMMES by Philadelphia theater company Applied Mechanics. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,149 | Lovelace features as a character in "Spyfall, Part 2", the second episode of "Doctor Who", series 12, which first aired on BBC One on 5 January 2020. The character was portrayed by Sylvie Briggs, alongside characterisations of Charles Babbage and Noor Inayat Khan. In 2021, Nvidia named its GPU architecture featured in the RTX 4000 Series, "Ada Lovelace", after her. It is also the first Nvidia architecture to feature both a first and last name. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,150 | The computer language Ada, created on behalf of the United States Department of Defense, was named after Lovelace. The reference manual for the language was approved on 10 December 1980 and the Department of Defense Military Standard for the language, "MIL-STD-1815", was given the number of the year of her birth. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,151 | In 1981, the Association for Women in Computing inaugurated its Ada Lovelace Award. Since 1998, the British Computer Society (BCS) has awarded the Lovelace Medal, and in 2008 initiated an annual competition for women students. BCSWomen sponsors the Lovelace Colloquium, an annual conference for women undergraduates. Ada College is a further-education college in Tottenham Hale, London, focused on digital skills. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,152 | Ada Lovelace Day is an annual event celebrated on the second Tuesday of October, which began in 2009. Its goal is to "... raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering, and maths," and to "create new role models for girls and women" in these fields. Events have included Wikipedia edit-a-thons with the aim of improving the representation of women on Wikipedia in terms of articles and editors to reduce unintended gender bias on Wikipedia. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,153 | The Ada Initiative was a non-profit organisation dedicated to increasing the involvement of women in the free culture and open source movements. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,154 | The Engineering in Computer Science and Telecommunications College building in Zaragoza University is called the Ada Byron Building. The computer centre in the village of Porlock, near where Lovelace lived, is named after her. Ada Lovelace House is a council-owned building in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, near where Lovelace spent her infancy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,155 | In 2013, Ada Developers Academy was founded and named after her. The mission of Ada Developers Academy is to diversify tech by providing women and gender diverse people the skills, experience, and community support to become professional software developers to change the face of tech. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,156 | On 17 September 2013, the BBC Radio 4 biography programme "Great Lives" devoted an episode to Ada Lovelace; she was sponsored by TV presenter Konnie Huq | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,157 | As of November 2015, all new British passports have included an illustration of Lovelace and Babbage. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,158 | On 2 February 2018, Satellogic, a high-resolution Earth observation imaging and analytics company, launched a ÑuSat type micro-satellite named in honour of Ada Lovelace. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,159 | On 27 July 2018, Senator Ron Wyden submitted, in the United States Senate, the designation of 9 October 2018 as National Ada Lovelace Day: "To honor the life and contributions of Ada Lovelace as a leading woman in science and mathematics". The resolution (S.Res.592) was considered, and agreed to without amendment and with a preamble by unanimous consent. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,160 | In November 2020 it was announced that Trinity College Dublin whose library had previously held forty busts, all of them of men, was commissioning four new busts of women, one of whom was to be Lovelace. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,161 | In March 2022, a statue of Ada Lovelace was installed at the site of the former Ergon House in the City of Westminster, London, honoring its scientific history. (The redevelopment was part of a complex wtith Imperial Chemical House.) The statue was sculpted by Etienne and Mary Millner and based on the portrait by Margaret Sarah Carpenter. The sculpture was unveiled on International Women's Day, 2022. It stands on the 7th floor of Millbank Quarter overlooking the junction of Dean Bradley Street and Horseferry Road. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,162 | In September 2022, Nvidia announced the Ada Lovelace graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,163 | Special exhibitions were displayed by the Science Museum in London, England and the Weston Library (part of the Bodleian Library) in Oxford, England. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,164 | Six copies of the 1843 first edition of "Sketch of the Analytical Engine" with Ada Lovelace's "Notes" have been located. Three are held at Harvard University, one at the University of Oklahoma, and one at the United States Air Force Academy. On 20 July 2018, the sixth copy was sold at auction to an anonymous buyer for £95,000. A digital facsimile of one of the copies in the Harvard University Library is available online. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,165 | In December 2016, a letter written by Ada Lovelace was forfeited by Martin Shkreli to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance for unpaid taxes owed by Shkreli. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=974 |
12,166 | Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun ( , ; 23 March 191216 June 1977) was a German-American aerospace engineer and space architect. He was a member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS, as well as the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany and later a pioneer of rocket and space technology in the United States. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,167 | As a young man, von Braun worked in Nazi Germany's rocket development program. He helped design and co-developed the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde during World War II. Following the war, he was secretly moved to the United States, along with about 1,600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip. He worked for the United States Army on an intermediate-range ballistic missile program, and he developed the rockets that launched the United States' first space satellite Explorer 1 in 1958. He worked with Walt Disney on a series of films, which popularized the idea of human space travel in the US and beyond between 1955 and 1957. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,168 | In 1960, his group was assimilated into NASA, where he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and as the chief architect of the Saturn V super heavy-lift launch vehicle that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. In 1967, von Braun was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1975, he received the National Medal of Science. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,169 | Von Braun is widely seen as the "father of space travel", the "father of rocket science" or the "father of the American lunar program". He advocated a human mission to Mars. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,170 | Wernher von Braun was born on 23 March 1912, in the small town of Wirsitz in the Province of Posen, Kingdom of Prussia, then German Empire and now Poland. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,171 | His father, Magnus Freiherr von Braun (1878–1972), was a civil servant and conservative politician; he served as Minister of Agriculture in the federal government during the Weimar Republic. His mother, Emmy von Quistorp (1886–1959), traced her ancestry through both parents to medieval European royalty and was a descendant of Philip III of France, Valdemar I of Denmark, Robert III of Scotland, and Edward III of England. Wernher had an older brother, the West German diplomat Sigismund von Braun, who served as Secretary of State in the Foreign Office in the 1970s, and a younger brother, Magnus von Braun, who was a rocket scientist and later a senior executive with Chrysler. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,172 | The family moved to Berlin, Brandenburg, in 1915, where his father worked at the Ministry of the Interior. After Wernher's Confirmation, his mother gave him a telescope, and he developed a passion for astronomy. Von Braun learned to play both the cello and the piano at an early age and at one time wanted to become a composer. He took lessons from the composer Paul Hindemith. The few pieces of Wernher's youthful compositions that exist are reminiscent of Hindemith's style. He could play piano pieces of Beethoven and Bach from memory. Beginning in 1925, Wernher attended a boarding school at Ettersburg Castle near Weimar, Free State of Thuringia, where he did not do well in physics and mathematics. There he acquired a copy of "Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen" (1923, "By Rocket into Planetary Space") by rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth. In 1928, his parents moved him to the Hermann-Lietz-Internat (also a residential school) on the East Frisian North Sea island of Spiekeroog. Space travel had always fascinated Wernher, and from then on he applied himself to physics and mathematics to pursue his interest in rocket engineering. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,173 | The world's first large-scale experimental rocket program was Opel RAK under the leadership of Fritz von Opel and Max Valier during the late 1920s leading to the first manned rocket cars and rocket planes, which paved the way for the Nazi era V2 program and US and Soviet activities from 1950 onwards.The Opel RAK program and the spectacular public demonstrations of ground and air vehicles drew large crowds, as well as caused global public excitement as so-called "Rocket Rumble" and had a large long-lasting impact on later spaceflight pioneers, in particular on Wernher von Braun. Sixteen year old Wernher was so enthusiastic about the public Opel RAK demonstrations, that he constructed his own homemade rocket car, nearly killing himself in the process. and causing a major disruption in a crowded street by detonating the toy wagon to which he had attached fireworks. He was taken into custody by the local police until his father came to get him. The Great Depression put an end to the Opel RAK program and Fritz von Opel left Germany in 1930, emigrating first to the US, later to France and Switzerland. After the break-up of Opel-RAK program, Valier eventually was killed while experimenting with liquid-fueled rockets as means of propulsion in mid-1930, and is considered the first fatality of the dawning space age. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,174 | In 1930, von Braun attended the Technische Hochschule Berlin, where he joined the "Spaceflight Society" ("Verein für Raumschiffahrt" or "VfR"), co-founded by Valier, and worked with Willy Ley in his liquid-fueled rocket motor tests in conjunction with others such as Rolf Engel, Rudolf Nebel, Hermann Oberth or Paul Ehmayr. In spring 1932, he graduated with a diploma in mechanical engineering. His early exposure to rocketry convinced him that the exploration of space would require far more than applications of the current engineering technology. Wanting to learn more about physics, chemistry, and astronomy, von Braun entered the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin for doctoral studies and graduated with a doctorate in physics in 1934. He also studied at ETH Zürich for a term from June to October 1931. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,175 | In 1930, von Braun attended a presentation given by Auguste Piccard. After the talk, the young student approached the famous pioneer of high-altitude balloon flight, and stated to him: "You know, I plan on traveling to the Moon at some time." Piccard is said to have responded with encouraging words. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,176 | According to historian Norman Davies, von Braun was able to pursue a career as a rocket scientist in Germany due to a "curious oversight" in the Treaty of Versailles which did not include rocketry in its list of weapons forbidden to Germany. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,177 | Von Braun had an ambivalent and complex relationship with Nazi Germany. He applied for membership of the Nazi Party on 12 November 1937, and was issued membership number 5,738,692. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,178 | Michael J. Neufeld, an author of aerospace history and chief of the Space History Division at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, wrote that ten years after von Braun obtained his Nazi Party membership, he signed an affidavit for the U.S. Army, though he stated the incorrect year: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,179 | In 1939, I was officially demanded to join the National Socialist Party. At this time I was already Technical Director at the Army Rocket Center at Peenemünde (Baltic Sea). The technical work carried out there had, in the meantime, attracted more and more attention in higher levels. Thus, my refusal to join the party would have meant that I would have to abandon the work of my life. Therefore, I decided to join. My membership in the party did not involve any political activity. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,180 | It has not been ascertained whether von Braun's error with regard to the year was deliberate or a simple mistake. Neufeld further wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,181 | Von Braun, like other Peenemünders, was assigned to the local group in Karlshagen; there is no evidence that he did more than send in his monthly dues. But he is seen in some photographs with the party's swastika pin in his lapel – it was politically useful to demonstrate his membership. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,182 | Von Braun's later attitude toward the National Socialist regime of the late 1930s and early 1940s was complex. He said that he had been so influenced by the early Nazi promise of release from the post–World War I economic effects, that his patriotic feelings had increased. In a 1952 memoir article he admitted that, at that time, he "fared relatively rather well under totalitarianism". Yet, he also wrote that "to us, Hitler was still only a pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin moustache" and that he perceived him as "another Napoleon" who was "wholly without scruples, a godless man who thought himself the only god". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,183 | Later examination of Von Braun’s background, conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, suggests that his background check file contained no derogatory information pertaining to his involvement in the party, but it was found that he had numerous letters of commendation for outstanding performance of duties during his time working under the Nazi party. Overall FBI conclusions point to Von Braun’s involvement in the Nazi Party to be purely for the furthering of his academic career, or out of fear of imprisonment or execution. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,184 | Von Braun joined the SS horseback riding school on 1 November 1933 as an "SS-Anwärter". He left the following year. In 1940, von Braun joined the SS and was given the rank of Untersturmführer in the Allgemeine-SS and issued membership number 185,068. In 1947, he gave the U.S. War Department this explanation: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,185 | When shown a picture of himself standing behind Himmler, von Braun claimed to have worn the SS uniform only that one time, but in 2002 a former SS officer at Peenemünde told the BBC that von Braun had regularly worn the SS uniform to official meetings. He began as an Untersturmführer (Second lieutenant) and was promoted three times by Himmler, the last time in June 1943 to SS-Sturmbannführer (Major). Von Braun later claimed that these were simply technical promotions received each year regularly by mail. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,186 | In 1933, von Braun was working on his creative doctorate when the Nazi Party came to power in a coalition government in Germany; rocketry was almost immediately moved onto the national agenda. An artillery captain, Walter Dornberger, arranged an Ordnance Department research grant for von Braun, who then worked next to Dornberger's existing solid-fuel rocket test site at Kummersdorf. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,187 | In 1932, Von Braun received a Bachelor of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Institute of Technology in Berlin, Germany. During a period in 1931, Von Braun attended the Technical Institute in Switzerland. During this time in Switzerland, Von Braun assisted Professor Hermann Oberth in writing a book concerning the possibilities of creating and manufacturing liquid-propellant rockets. Shortly after this, Von Braun founded his own private rocket development business in Berlin, through which made the first rocket fired by gasoline and liquid oxygen. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,188 | In 1932, having caught wind of Von Braun’s rocket business, the German Army connected with Von Braun to pursue basic missile research and weather data experimentation. Von Braun said that the Germany Government financed the development of test stands and facilities for experimentation in Darmstadt, Germany. In 1939, Von Braun was appointed a technical advisor at Peenemunde Proving Ground on the Baltic Sea. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,189 | Von Braun was awarded a Doctorate of Philosophy in physics (aerospace engineering) on 27 July 1934, from the University of Berlin for a thesis entitled ""About Combustion Tests""; his doctoral supervisor was Erich Schumann. However, this thesis was only the public part of von Braun's work. His actual full thesis, "Construction, Theoretical, and Experimental Solution to the Problem of the Liquid Propellant Rocket" (dated 16 April 1934) was kept classified by the German army, and was not published until 1960. By the end of 1934, his group had successfully launched two liquid fuel rockets that rose to heights of 2.2 and . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,190 | Von Braun continued his guided missile work throughout World War Two, and met with Adolf Hitler on several occasions, being formally decorated by Hitler twice, including being awarded the Iron Cross. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,191 | At the time, Germany was highly interested in American physicist Robert H. Goddard's research. Before 1939, German scientists occasionally contacted Goddard directly with technical questions. Von Braun used Goddard's plans from various journals and incorporated them into the building of the "Aggregat" (A) series of rockets. The first successful launch of an A-4 took place on 3 October 1942. The A-4 rocket would become well known as the V-2. In 1963, von Braun reflected on the history of rocketry, and said of Goddard's work: "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,192 | Goddard confirmed his work was used by von Braun in 1944, shortly before the Nazis began firing V-2s at England. A V-2 crashed in Sweden and some parts were sent to an Annapolis lab where Goddard was doing research for the Navy. If this was the so-called Bäckebo Bomb, it had been procured by the British in exchange for Spitfires; Annapolis would have received some parts from them. Goddard is reported to have recognized components he had invented, and inferred that his brainchild had been turned into a weapon. Later, von Braun would comment: "I have very deep and sincere regret for the victims of the V-2 rockets, but there were victims on both sides ... A war is a war, and when my country is at war, my duty is to help win that war." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,193 | In response to Goddard's claims, von Braun said "at no time in Germany did I or any of my associates ever see a Goddard patent". This was independently confirmed. He wrote that claims about his lifting Goddard's work were the furthest from the truth, noting that Goddard's paper "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes", which was studied by von Braun and Oberth, lacked the specificity of liquid-fuel experimentation with rockets. It was also confirmed that he was responsible for an estimated 20 patentable innovations related to rocketry, as well as receiving U.S. patents after the war concerning the advancement of rocketry. Documented accounts also stated he provided solutions to a host of aerospace engineering problems in the 1950s and 1960s. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,194 | On 22 December 1942, Adolf Hitler ordered the production of the A-4 as a "vengeance weapon", and the Peenemünde group developed it to target London. Following von Braun's 7 July 1943 presentation of a color movie showing an A-4 taking off, Hitler was so enthusiastic that he personally made von Braun a professor shortly thereafter. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,195 | By that time, the British and Soviet intelligence agencies were aware of the rocket program and von Braun's team at Peenemünde, based on the intelligence provided by the Polish underground Home Army. Over the nights of 17–18 August 1943, RAF Bomber Command's Operation Hydra dispatched raids on the Peenemünde camp consisting of 596 aircraft, and dropped 1,800 tons of explosives. The facility was salvaged and most of the engineering team remained unharmed; however, the raids killed von Braun's engine designer Walter Thiel and Chief Engineer Walther, and the rocket program was delayed. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,196 | The first combat A-4, renamed the V-2 ("Vergeltungswaffe 2" "Retaliation/Vengeance Weapon 2") for propaganda purposes, was launched toward England on 7 September 1944, only 21 months after the project had been officially commissioned. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,197 | During 1936, von Braun's rocketry team working at Kummersdorf investigated installing liquid-fuelled rockets in aircraft. Ernst Heinkel enthusiastically supported their efforts, supplying a He-72 and later two He-112s for the experiments. Later in 1936, Erich Warsitz was seconded by the RLM to von Braun and Heinkel, because he had been recognized as one of the most experienced test pilots of the time, and because he also had an extraordinary fund of technical knowledge. After he familiarized Warsitz with a test-stand run, showing him the corresponding apparatus in the aircraft, he asked: "Are you with us and will you test the rocket in the air? Then, Warsitz, you will be a famous man. And later we will fly to the Moon – with you at the helm!" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,198 | In June 1937, at Neuhardenberg (a large field about east of Berlin, listed as a reserve airfield in the event of war), one of these latter aircraft was flown with its piston engine shut down during flight by Warsitz, at which time it was propelled by von Braun's rocket power alone. Despite a wheels-up landing and the fuselage having been on fire, it proved to official circles that an aircraft could be flown satisfactorily with a back-thrust system through the rear. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
12,199 | At the same time, Hellmuth Walter's experiments into hydrogen peroxide based rockets were leading towards light and simple rockets that appeared well-suited for aircraft installation. Also the firm of Hellmuth Walter at Kiel had been commissioned by the RLM to build a rocket engine for the He-112, so there were two different new rocket motor designs at Neuhardenberg: whereas von Braun's engines were powered by alcohol and liquid oxygen, Walter engines had hydrogen peroxide and calcium permanganate as a catalyst. Von Braun's engines used direct combustion and created fire, the Walter devices used hot vapors from a chemical reaction, but both created thrust and provided high speed. The subsequent flights with the He-112 used the Walter-rocket instead of von Braun's; it was more reliable, simpler to operate, and safer for the test pilot, Warsitz. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=33783 |
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