You may think of artificial intelligence as a pretty modern thing, but the origins go way, way back to the 1800s and the introduction of the Analytical Engine. This engine was a massive industrial-era machine created by Charles Babbage. But he didn’t create it alone, nor did he realize what it was truly capable of alone. No, that honor falls to Ada Lovelace, a remarkable young woman with quite the marvelous mind.

Although Ada was often very ill, even requiring crutches when she became paralyzed after a particularly nasty bout of the measles, she thrived in her scientific brilliance. When she was learning the basics of math in her young teens, a tutor noted that she would one day be “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence.” That’s no small praise!

And it didn’t take long for that praise to be vindicated. She did, after all, become something of a master in such complex mathematical concepts as “differential calculus.”

As Lovelace grew into her mathematical genius, elsewhere in England, the engineer Charles Babbage was building his follow-up to the Difference Engine.

Babbage called his new machine the Analytical Engine. If it worked, it could crack math problems that once could only be solved by a group of people
called “human computers.”

At just 17 years old, Lovelace met with Babbage, and before long, became a collaborator. She used every possible excuse to continue visiting him and his Analytical Engine. Lovelace began to piece together how to use such a machine. She started to think the Analytical Engine could be so much more than a giant industrial calculator. One day, she thought, it might write music and words, or even create pictures.

She is often credited with envisioning the first computer program. She imagined an algorithm, or set of instructions, which could be used for all kinds of analytical purposes.

Lovelace recognized the potential for technology to work hand-in-hand with humans, a debate that still rages today with the growth of artificial intelligence. She saw such miraculous machines as going beyond mere numbers. They could do anything we could think of, as long as we gave them the right instructions.

This is why so many point to Lovelace as the first-ever computer programmer, some even calling her a prophet of the computer age.