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, though an advocate for the abolition of slavery. She survived Ada, whose adult 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