Two "Tech Sisters": Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) and Admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992)

There's a lot of talk about "tech bros" now, most of it not flattering. This being International Women's Day, and March being Women's History Month (so if I fail to complete this post today it will still be timely) I want to focus on two women, Ada Lovelace (portrait above; who, thanks to my daughter, is the namesake of my granddaughter) and Admiral Grace Hopper. I've called them "tech sisters" although their lifespans did not overlap, because each had a profound effect on the technology of computing. 

 Ada's father was Lord Byron, romantic poet, politician, and adventurer, who died when she was eight. Her mother, Annabella Milbanke (Lady Byron), was a proper noble Englishwoman, and an advocate for the abolition of slavery. She survived Ada, whose life was tormented by bouts of ill health, and who died at 36, the same age at which her father died. There's an extensive piece on Ada's life and her intellectual accomplishments here, written by Stephen Wolfram, "a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking" and a brilliant physicist.

Ada showed early interest in science and technology. As Wolfram notes, at age 11 she became interested in "flyology" and hoped to find a way to imitate bird flight using steam power. What determined much of the course of her adult intellectual life occurred at 17, when she was presented at court and met Charles Babbage, an astronomer, mathematician, and inventor. This began a friendship that lasted the rest of Ada's life. 

Wolfram describes how Babbage became interested in the development of logarithmic and trigonometric charts, useful in engineering, military, and navigational applications. Errors in them could have disastrous consequences, so Babbage sought to develop ways to assure the calculations used to produce them were done accurately. He invented a mechanical computing device called the "difference engine," which he showed to Ada and her mother soon after their first meeting.

For the next roughly nineteen years Ada became Babbage's off and on collaborator as he tried to develop an improved Difference Engine, then turned to a project a magnitude greater that he called the "Analytical Engine." It was never built; Wolfram observes that it would have been as large as a railway locomotive. During this time Ada married William King and through him became Countess of Lovelace. They had three children. Despite household duties and bouts of illness, Ada found time to continue working with Babbage. She translated notes written in French from a lecture Babbage had given, and added notes of her own that were much longer. Anna Siffert, a professor of mathematics at the University of Münster, noted in an article written when she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute that Ada's notes include "a step-by-step description for computation of Bernoulli numbers with Babbage's machine - basically an algorithm - which, in effect, make her the world's first computer programmer."

Wolfram sums her up thus: 

I think one can fairly say that Ada Lovelace was the first person ever to glimpse with any clarity what has become a defining phenomenon of our technology and even our civilization: the notion of universal computation.

 Our second "tech sister" is U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, also known as "Amazing Grace." She was born in New York City in 1906 and received her PhD in mathematics and mathematical physics from Yale, after which she became a professor of mathematics at Vassar. As told by Rick Spilman in the Old Salt Blog, at the outset of World War II she tried to enlist in the Navy but was rejected because she was too old (34) and too thin(!) In 1943, she was accepted by the U.S. Navy Reserve, which evidently saw a need for her skills. She was sent to Harvard to work on the Bureau of Ships Computation Project, where she worked as a programmer. Then, according to Spilman:

She would go on to develop the first compiler and to work on the first machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL and other languages. In the 1970s, she advocated for networked computing and for standardization and testing of programming languages, a standard that was adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

She retired, as required by regulations, at the age of 60, but was called back to active duty twice, was promoted to Rear Admiral in 1985, and finally retired in 1986, shortly before her 80th birthday. She died on New Year's Day, 1992, at the age of 85. Admiral Hopper is remembered in several ways. The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing has, since 1994, hosted "a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront." Two buildings and a warship have been named for her: Hopper Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy, which houses the Academy's Center for Cybersecurity Studies; Grace Hopper College at Yale; and the Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer USS Hopper. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by President Barack Obama.

Image of Ada Lovelace: detail of portrait by Margaret Sarah Carpenter, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo of Grace Hopper: James S. Davis, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Chief Justice Robert M. Bell, of the Maryland Court of Appeals, who made Black History twice.

In September of 1967 I arrived in Cambridge to begin my first year at Harvard Law School. I had some trepidation, thinking I was entering a sort of F. Scott Fitzgerald world where most of my classmates would be prep school and Ivy League college grads from wealthy families and I, a graduate of a then little known state university in Florida with parents who never went to college, would be considered a hopeless rube. As I got to know my dorm neighbors this fear was dispelled. Most were from middle class backgrounds, and only a few sported Ivy undergraduate degrees. One whom I found particularly welcoming was Bob Bell, a second year student and thus a helpful source of information on what to expect from certain professors and other bits of local lore. As explained below, he would go on from law school to a career that culminated in what I can only call poetic justice.

Bob and I found a bond in our shared love of music. My musical taste at the time ranged from classical to country to folk to rock, but I had little exposure to contemporary jazz. One afternoon I sat in Bob's room as he played Yusef Lateef's album Psychicemotus. I was particularly taken by the track Bamboo Flute Blues because I'd long loved flute music (despite having tried and failed to learn to play flute when I was in fourth grade) and because it sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. I had a budding interest in blues, largely thanks to the Rolling Stones. 

In the spring of 1968 I brought to Bob's room the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's latest album, The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw, which I had bought at the Harvard Coop. I didn't know anything about Butterfield and his group but I was intrigued by the album's cover and title ("Pigboy Crabshaw," I've since learned, was a nickname for Elvin Bishop, who played guitar and sang in the group). I wasn't sure what Bob would think of a blues group made of mostly White guys (at the time "Resurrection" was recorded, of the eight members of the group only one, alto sax player Gene Dinwiddie, was Black) who, on this album, did covers of seven songs by Black blues or R&B artists along with two originals by Butterfield, one of them co-credited to Dinwiddie. He liked the album. I recall his especially liking the line "Big legged woman gonna carry me to my grave" from the cover of "Born Under a Bad Sign", originally recorded by Albert King.

Bob didn't mention it to me, but I learned from other students that he had a peculiar distinction: he was the only student at HLS at the time whose name appeared in our Constitutional Law casebook. This was because in July of 1960, when Bob was sixteen and president of his class at Baltimore's all Black Dunbar High School, he recruited several classmates to join with some students from Morgan State College, now Morgan State University, in a sit-in demonstration. They entered Hooper's Restaurant in downtown Baltimore, known to have a Whites-only policy, and demanded to be seated and served.* When asked to leave, twelve of them, including Bob, took seats and refused to leave. The restaurant's owner went to the nearest police station, swore out a warrant, and Bob and the others were arrested and charged with criminal trespass. They were tried and convicted in the Circuit Court of Baltimore City and fined ten dollars each.** 

At that time, sit-in demonstrations, inspired by Rosa Parks' refusal to give up a bus seat to a White man, were becoming popular as a way to protest racial segregation in privately owned places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, holding that segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Attorneys active in civil rights litigation believed this principle could be extended to racial discrimination by private entities, at least if the use of police and courts to enforce such discrimination met the "state action" requirement. Prominent civil rights lawyers, including Juanita Jackson Mitchell and Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first Black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, voluntarily represented Bob and the others in an appeal to the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state's highest court. Despite their efforts, on January 9, 1962 the Court of Appeals upheld the convictions. 

An appeal from Maryland's highest court could only be taken to the U.S. Supreme Court. At this stage, Bob and the others were represented by Constance Baker Motley, who later became the first Black woman to be made a federal judge, and by Jack Greenberg, who had been active in the appeal of Brown v. Board of Education and later succeeded Marshall as Director-Counsel of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund. For most kinds of cases, the Supreme Court is not obligated to take appeals. Counsel for the appellants must petition the Court to take the appeal. In the case of the Baltimore sit-in petitioners, which became known as Bell v. Maryland (Bob's name getting pride of place because it was first alphabetically), the Court took the appeal.

Greenberg, who argued for the appellants before the Supreme Court, said the Court should overturn the convictions because they violated the equal protection and due process principles of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, the Court's majority didn't reach that conclusion. Instead, it noted that after the appellants' convictions and after the Court of Appeals' affirmation of those convictions, 

Maryland has enacted laws that abolish the crime of which petitioners were convicted. These laws accord petitioners a right to be served in Hooper's restaurant, and make unlawful conduct like that of Hooper's president and hostess in refusing them service because of their race.***

The Court then noted that

Maryland follows the universal common law rule that, when the legislature repeals a criminal statute or otherwise removes the State's condemnation from conduct that was formerly deemed criminal, this action requires the dismissal of a pending criminal proceeding charging such conduct. The rule applies to any such proceeding which at the time of the supervening legislation, has not yet reached final disposition in the highest court authorized to review it.****

Accordingly, the Court vacated the judgment of the Maryland Court of Appeals and remanded the case to that court which, upon remand, held that the Baltimore and Maryland public accommodations statutes, along with the subsequently enacted federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, operated only prospectively and therefore could not invalidate the Hooper's sit-in demonstrators' convictions.***** However, this was not the end of the story. As Professor Reynolds notes at the conclusion of his previously cited article:

On December 14, 1964, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Hamm v. City of Rock Hill, holding that the 1964 Civil Rights Act did indeed abate all pending prosecutions of those who had been arrested for activity that the Act protected. Although Hamm readily appears controlling, the Court of Appeals waited nearly five months to issue an order on April 9, 1965, reversing the convictions and assessing costs against the State, thereby ending the historic case of Bell v. Maryland.******

Just over a year after the Court of Appeals issued its final order in Bell v. Maryland, Robert Mack Bell received the degree Bachelor of Arts in History from Morgan State College. Later that year he matriculated at Harvard Law School, from which he graduated with the degree Juris Doctor in 1969. He then returned to his home town, Baltimore, and was in private law practice for six years.

In 1975, Bell was appointed to the District Court of Maryland, District 1, in Baltimore City and served there until 1980. He was an Associate Judge, Baltimore City Circuit Court, 8th Judicial Circuit, from 1980 to 1984, when he was appointed to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. Seven years later he was appointed to the state's highest court and became the chief justice in 1996. He was a member of the Court of Appeals Standing Committee on Rules of practice and Procedure from 1977 to 1982; the Commission to Revise the Annotated Code of Maryland, 1980-82; and the Board of Directors, Judicial Institute of Maryland, 1982-84. In August 2006, Bell was named Chair of the National Center for State Courts' Board of Directors. At the same time, Judge Bell also was named president of the Conference of Chief Justices.*******

In 2013 he reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy for Maryland judges. His career was significant for Black History in two ways. First, he helped to instigate and carry out a sit-in demonstration that led to litigation that clarified the legal status of such non-violent demonstrations. Second, he became the first Black Chief Justice of the Maryland Court of Appeals (now called the Maryland Supreme Court) and, in a delicious bit of irony, thereby became Chief Justice of the very court that had affirmed his conviction in 1962. 

In 2008 he made this observation about how he considered the significance of his case:

I think my case has given me that point of reference, and it also makes me appreciate the extent of progress that has been made. And it also made me able to gauge the extent of the progress which has yet to be made. I think, not just about that case, but about that era in that fashion. The unfortunate thing is that younger people don't remember it. They don't know what happened. And therefore you're finding a different kind of attitude and a complacency which I think is more dangerous than anything else. So our job is pretty hard.********

I believe this observation is still relevant in 2025.

__________

*For Justice Bell's own account of the events leading up to, on the day of, and after the Hooper's sit-in, see Maryland State Archives: "Robert Mack Bell, Baptism by Fire" in Irons, Peter, The Courage of Their Convictions, The Free Press (1988) at pp.141-152.

**For a thorough and insightful discussion of the factual circumstances, personnel, and legal issues involved in the litigation arising from the Hooper's sit-in demonstration, see Reynolds, William L., "Foreword: The Legal History of the Great Sit-In Case of Bell v. Maryland" (2002). Faculty Scholarship. 576.

***Bell v. Maryland, 378 U.S. 226, 229 (1964).

****Id. at 231, citing Keller v. State, 12 Md. 322 (1858).

*****Bell v. State, 236 Md. 356, 369 (1964).

******Reynolds, supra, at p.794 (footnotes and citations omitted).

*******Center for Civil Rights in Education

********Maryland State Archives, supra, at p.152.

Photo: 1msulax (talk) 13:26, 4 May 2008 (UTC).The original uploader was 1msulax at English Wikipedia., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Robert Burns' birthday, and my wife's, celebrated thanks to Repast Baroque and Anna O'Connoll

This past Saturday, January 25, was the 266th birthday of the Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns (1759-1796), and coincidentally that, of fewer digits, of my wife of almost 34 years, Martha Foley. The Burns birthday, and Martha's, were celebrated at a "Burns Supper" graciously hosted by Frances Stern at her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Her supper included salmon, roasted tomatoes, tattie scones, and delicious shortbread.

The program was provided by members of Repast Baroque, joined by harpist and soprano Anna O'Connell. In the photo Ms. O'Connell is at the left, with her Celtic harp. Repast members, left to right, are: Sarah Stone, on baroque cello; Gabe Shuford on keyboard (at Repast concerts Gabe plays harpsichord; the space here was too small to fit one); and Stephanie Corwin on bassoon. The festivities began with Ms. O'Connell's spirited reading of Burns' poem, "The Flowers of Edinburgh." This was followed by a number of Burns poems set to music by various composers, which Ms. O'Connell sang in her clarion clear and wide ranging soprano voice. She also performed several pieces by Scottish composers inspired by Burns, solely on harp.

It being Martha's birthday, I was delighted that one of the Burns poems set to music chosen for the program was "My Wife's a Winsome Wee Thing." I don't know if this was inserted on Martha's behalf, but the musicians did break from the Burns performance to lead us all in "Happy Birthday," and a cake was presented. The program continued with a lively "There's Nae Luck About the Hoose," and concluded with "The Parting Kiss" and what is Burns' best known poem, "Auld Lang Syne," in which we all joined.

Repast's next concert will be on Saturday, March 15 at 3:00 PM, at the McKinney Chapel of the First Unitarian Congregational Society, 116 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn, celebrating The Ides of March, at which Sarah, Gabe, and Stephanie will be re-joined by violinist and new mother Natalie Rose Kress and by guest musician Margaret Owens on oboe and recorder. The program will feature music by Handel accompanied by projections of the 1908 silent film Julius Caesar and other early silent films. The concert will be repeated the following day, Sunday, March 16, at 3:00 PM, at the Manhattan Country Day School, 150 West 85th Street.