Born to a passionate, erratic poet and a mathematician mother, Ada Gordan was raised by her mother under a strict regimen of science and mathematics, as she feared her daughter might inherit her fathers volatile temperament. Ada grew up with a fascination of machinery, designing imaginary machines and becoming absorbed by new inventions of the time. She became known as Ada Lovelace, after her marriage to William King, Earl of Lovelace. Lovelace was introduced in 1833, to Charles Babbage, a Professor of Mathematics who had attained celebrity for his visionary plans for gigantic clockwork calculating machines. Babbage described her as that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects could have exerted over it. Babbage had a plan for a device he had called the Analytical Engine, which had all of the essential elements of a modern computer. Although it was never built, Lovelace translated a short article about the Analytical Engine, and Babbage then asked her to expand it. It became at least three times as long and contained early algorithms intended to be carried out by a machine, so that Lovelace became referred to as the first computer programmer. She was interested in how society could interact with such machines, and how the machines could enhance peoples lives. The notes became a critical inspiration for Alan Turings work on the first modern computers in the 1940s.
