Who Was...Ada Lovelace Computer wizard of Victorian England
Daughter of the famous romantic poet Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace was a child prodigy. Brilliant at maths she read numbers like most people read words.
In 1843 Ada came to the attention of Charles Babbage, a scientist and techno-whizz who had just built an amazing new "Thinking Machine". She and Mr Babbage started working together - a perfect partnership which led to the most important invention of the modern world: THE COMPUTER!
'Ada became almost as famous as her father had once been. Imagine how it must have been for the Victorians [...] As children, they had lived in a world with no railways, when it took days of being cooped up in a stagecoach to travel from London to Somerset. The electric telegraph, the steam engine, the gas lamps that illuminated the dark were all recent inventions. Now this book, by the daughter of England's greatest poet, explained that it was possible to build a machine that could operate like a human mind...'