Byron’s daughter – the world’s first computer programmer

It’s not so easy finding important innovators in the history of science, mathematics and engineering who are women. In fact, it’s really quite hard. So I asked a couple of friends to come up with some names.

Suggested by Jacki Fortune in Sydney (who also proposed Helena Rubinstein), one who certainly deserves our attention is Ada Lovelace. She was born Ada Byron, the daughter of the poet, Lord Byron, in 1815. She was to marry the Earl of Lovelace.

Quite early in life she became fascinated by mathematics, and in due course by the work of Charles Babbage. Babbage was impressed with her intelligence – he called her “the enchantress of numbers” – and in 1842-43 she wrote a series of notes on his “Analytical Machine”, the world’s first computer. These notes described how Babbage’s machine could be programmed and are now widely credited as being the world’s first computer programme.

Of course, a major contributory reason for the lack of outstanding female maths, science and engineering students in our schools in western societies is the expectation that girls are not good at these subjects.

At a fine girl’s school in Sydney, Ascham, my daughter, Rachel, was lucky enough to find a brilliant (male) teacher of maths, who thought that she had real gifts. How right he was.

I wonder whether any real progress is being made now with the teaching of maths, science and engineering to girls in our schools?

And which are the other women who should be celebrated?

The miracle of aircon

In the midst of a heatwave in midsummer Sydney, temperature at 45.5 degrees Celsius, my friend and colleague Jacki Fortune writes: “Spare a grateful thought for Willis Carrier, inventor of air conditioning.”

Certainly his creation can make life so much easier in sub-tropical Australia, where the temperature soars for a while, and often with it the humidity. But in real tropical climates, where temperature and humidity are constantly high, aircon is not so much a convenience as a necessity. In Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and a dozen other countries, it creates conditions in which WORK and THINKING can take place. It’s not surprising that, before its arrival, these economies were based only on fishing and farming.

I would even say that the economic miracle of recent decades in South-East Asia simply could not have occurred without air conditioning.

Willis Carrier? He was an American engineer, born in 1876. And his breakthrough drawings were made in 1902. He was granted a patent four years later and continuously improved his “Apparatus” in the following years. Carrier and six colleagues formed a company in New York in 1915. For the first two decades of air conditioning, it was used to cool machines, not people. He died in 1950 with eighty patents to his name.

Not so famous as Thomas Edison. But what a legacy.