Noble Blood - How Ada Lovelace Constructed Her Wings

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

When Annabella Millbanke had a daughter with her husband, Lord Byron, she was terrified that their child might inherit his poetical madness. And so she steered the girl, Ada, toward math and logic, where eventually, Ada Lovelace became obsessed with the potential of computers. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Noble Blood merch — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the hips since high school.

Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They hit a bogo. Well, then you got it. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. If you are a seasoned listener of this podcast, you might remember our episode on Villa Diodati and its inhabitants one fateful summer. Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron. If you're an even more seasoned listener of this podcast, you might remember our very early episode on Lady Caroline Lamb and the quite literally fiery vengeance she orchestrated against her ex-lover Lord Byron. This is another episode that is not actually about Lord Byron himself, but I'm sure he would be pleased to know we're going to begin by talking about him yet again. By 1815, the 6th

Baron Byron had made quite the name for himself outside of his inherited title. He was famous in England and across the continent for both his literary and romantic exploits. It was Byromania, as dubbed by Caroline Lamb's cousin, Annabella Millbank. Annabella was the daughter of a baronet and a poet herself. She asked her cousin to pass along some of her work to Caroline's famous fling. And when she did, Caroline suggested to Byron that Annabella might actually make a good wife for him. Despite Byron's passion and reputation for sleeping his way through the men and women of London society,

Byron needed to settle down, ideally with an heiress to remedy his growing debt. And so he courted Annabella. Annabella had a reputation for being strict, chilly, and moral, which made her a very odd match for the loose, sociable, and decidedly. less moral poet. He is a very bad, very good man, Annabella once

allegedly told her mother. When Byron proposed, she first said no, writing him a summary of his character to dictate exactly why. But eventually, Annabella's mind was changed and she said yes.

Unfortunately, her first instinct was the correct one. The marriage was doomed from the start. In Annabella's 12 months married to Byron, she endured abuse from her husband, constant harassment from his creditors, and to top it all off, she would suffer the humiliation of hearing that Byron was cheating on her with his own half-sister, Augusta Lee. Despite their problems, the couple managed to have one child together. Byron had expected a quote, glorious boy and was initially disappointed when Annabella gave birth to a daughter,

Augusta Ada, named after, yes, exactly, the half-sister you might be thinking of. Ada was born on December 10, 1815, and about a month later in the early hours of January 16th, Annabella took her infant daughter from the home she shared with Byron and left the marriage. Byron would never see his wife or his daughter again. As Annabella raised her daughter on her own, she was worried that Ada would inherit her father's poetic madness. And so she discouraged imaginative and literary pursuits, instead fostering a discipline for arithmetic and logic.

Ada would grow up to work with the mathematician Charles Babbage on his proposed automatic computer, the analytical engine, and she understood the potential of the project in ways even her mentor did not. Ada wrote, quote, A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means, Hithro, in our

possession, have rendered possible. Thus, not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world are brought into more intimate and effective connection with each other. What Ada was recognizing was the language and application of a computer beyond basic computing, and today she is recognized by the scientific community as the first computer programmer. It was, as she called it, her approach of, quote, poetical science that allowed her to recognize the potential of the relationship and communication between humans and machines. In the end, Ada Lovelace's father's imagination

and her mother's logic would produce a pioneer. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Is the girl imaginative? Is she social or solitary, taciturn or talkative? Fond of reading or otherwise? And what is her tick? I mean, her foible. Is she passionate?

I hope that gods have made her anything save poetical. It is enough to have one such fool in the family. These are the words of Byron, in a letter to his half-sister, asking about his daughter, Ada, back in England while he was self-exiled abroad. Before Byron departed, he signed the deed of separation that both effectively ended his marriage and gave Annabella full custody of their daughter, Ada, a rarity for the time. The accusations against Byron of both sodomy and incest that were spreading through England put Byron in no position to argue for his parental rights. His only

request was that Augusta, his half-sister, be allowed to keep him informed of Ada's well-being after he left the continent. Through Augusta, Annabella replied to her estranged husband, quote, her prevailing characteristic is cheerfulness and good temper, observation, not devoid of imagination, but it is chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical ingenuity, the manufacture of ships and boats, etc. prefers prose to verse. These letters were written between the end of 1823 and the beginning of 1824 when Ada was 7 and 8. Annabella's letter would never receive a reply because Lord Byron died in Greece in April of 1824. He never saw his daughter, or as he once called her, the Electra of my Mycenae ever again. Ada only knew of her father's

passing vaguely, and she knew next to nothing about him as a man or historical figure until much later in life. Back when Annabella had separated from Byron in early 1816, She had taken Ada to her parents' home in Leicestershire, which was where she would be raised. Annabella's parents had recognized their daughter's intelligence at a young age, and they had hired a Cambridge professor to tutor her. In turn, Annabella began her own daughter's education when she was four years old. Annabella apparently possessed an Emily Gilmore-like tendency to fire tutors and governesses often, if they did not meet her expectations for her daughter's education,

and in the interim stretches between employees, she took charge of Ada's education herself. A system was applied to Ada's education that is not totally dissimilar from something you might see in a children's school today. Ada's good behavior, like paying attention, applying herself to her lessons, and sitting still, was rewarded with a ticket. Sitting still was the trickiest part for young Ada.

One of her early governesses, Miss Lamont, wrote that her young charge reminded her of a reindeer dashing about. Tickets could be confiscated when Ada did not meet her mother's expectations. When that same governess ultimately left her post, she reflected, quote, no person can be more rational, companionable, and endearing than this rare child. before adding that Ada would do almost anything to win her mother's praise.

However, Ada's eagerness for praise didn't mean that her mother's pressure was never met with resistance. Ada's rebellions could often prove to be volatile. Once, when Ada couldn't stop fidgeting, a housemaid was ordered to confine her fingers with black cotton bags. The housemaid's attempt was met with a bite from the then-weigh. five-year-old young lady of the house. Ada was sent to the corner to think about what she did, and she spent that time angrily biting down on the molding on the walls. At tea time, Ada was allowed to return, and Annabella comforted her daughter by reading to her, rather ironically, based on what we know, some soothing poetry. Ada was becoming prone to violent bouts like that, and Annabella forebodingly sought as a

sign of her separated husband's cursed temperament coming through. Ada was becoming more like her father in other ways. When she was eight, she invented the word gobble book to describe her newly developed appetite for reading. Around this time, her resistance to her schooling lessened. She became a passionate student across her subjects, from arithmetic to French to violin, the latter of which she often played while circling the billiards table as her daily exercise. In her book about Ada and Annabella,

the historian Miranda Seymour recounts that Ada thought outside the box when it came to her mother's rigid lessons. Ada, quote, built cities of colored bricks and turned geography lessons into flights of fancy. Could the waves in Norway really surge higher than her own tall house? End quote. Ada's relationship with her mother continued to be a complicated one. Many historians view Annabella as both overbearing and neglectful, while a smaller portion of historians find her behavior unremarkable compared to other upper-class mothers of the era. Ada was certainly isolated and under-socialized as a child.

Her mother was both obsessive about her daughter's education and anxious about any potential exposure to illness. Ada was also notably a celebrity in her own right in England thanks to her father's fame and notoriety, and his very public separation from Ada's mother, which only furthered the apparent need for Ada to stay out of public view. Ada's dearest and arguably only friend was her beloved cat Puff, though she also held a deep affection for her young cousin, George, and promised him puffed kittens.

The accusations of Annabella's neglectfulness come from the fact that as Ada got older, Annabella began to spend more and more time away from her daughter, visiting friends or taking rest cures for various health complications. During these periods, Ada was left in the care of her gun. governesses, tutors, and of course, Puff. I would be remiss if I didn't read you one of the letters 12-year-old Ada wrote about the varied adventures of Miss Puff. This one is to her mother while her mother was away.

Quote, your granddaughter, Puff, has taken up all her kittens into a very nasty, dirty hole in the roof of the house where nobody can get at them. She stays with them all day long and only comes down for her meals. I suppose their bed is made of cobwebs, and I think that Puff cannot have very refined taste. Around this time, something interesting begins to appear in Ada's letters beyond Puff's living habits. We first see it show up in a diary entry from February 1828. Quote, I am going to begin my paper wings tomorrow, and the more I think about it, the more I feel almost convinced that with a year-so's experience,

and practice, I shall be able to bring the art of flying to very great perfection. I think of writing a book on flyology illustrated with plates. After giving her mother updates on Puff, Ada's letters would provide updates on her attempts to build wings and fly. As you might imagine, progress was slow. Ada began to sign her letters, your affectionate young turkey, or your carrier pigeon. and it's not a stretch to wonder how much of her desire to fly was spurred on by intellectual curiosity and how much of it was connected to being isolated and alone, far from her mother.

In a letter from March that same year, Ada wrote, quote, since last night I've been thinking more about the flying, and I can find no difficulty in the motion or distension of the wings. I've already thought of a way of fixing them to the shoulder, and I think that they might perhaps be made of oil silk, and if that does not answer, I must try to do what I can with feathers. I know you will laugh at what I'm going to say, but I'm going to take the exact patterns of a bird's wing

in proportion to the size of its body, and then I am immediately going to set about making a pair of paper wings of exactly the same size as a bird's in proportion to my size. Ada goes on to admit that she lacks information regarding bird anatomy, but she has no interest in dissecting a bird to learn more, and so she prevails upon her mother to send a book on the subject. Ada's dreams of flying were put on pause,

not by her mother's disapproval, but by a serious illness she came down with in 1829. Ultimately, Ada was bedridden until mid-1832, save for the occasional brief expedition in a wheelchair or on crutches. That was Ada's life from ages 14 to 17, an exceptionally key period in any adolescence development. During this period, Annabella and Ada relocated to a home just outside of London to be closer to the best doctors, and eventually closer to society. Ada seems to have often been in great pain, even finding sitting up to be difficult at times. Her letters became less frequent during that period, and the ones that were written are difficult to read because of shaky penmanship.

Quote, this has been a sad, irregular week, reads one note to her tutor. Monday, I missed nothing, but was so desponding and despairing that I could have cried with very great pleasure. It was during this time that Annabella first introduced Ada to Lord Byron's poetry. Annabella's choice for her daughter was a poem called Fair The Well, a poem in which Byron was directly addressing Annabella after their separation. The poem includes the line, quote, When our child's first accents flow, wilt thou teach her to say father. Annabella also gave Ada selections from Byron's epic The Giaour, hopefully excluding the darker bits about being drowned in the sea for infidelity. Ada's reaction was apparently lukewarm. On a larger scale, the bedridden teen was given much more leeway than she had ever been in regards to her reading,

and her imagination continued to grow. But shortly after Ada was back in good health, her mother, hired a new tutor to refocus the now nearly adult Ada's education on arithmetic and religion. I should also note that this decision was influenced by a brief stint in 1833, in which Ada unsuccessfully attempted to elope with a young man historians believe was her shorthand tutor due to a record of his swift termination, although there is no definitive proof about who the young man identity actually was. The young couple did not get very far.

When Ada showed up at her lover's family home, his parents swiftly returned her to her mother, fearing the wrath of the famous Annabella. Hence the addition of a heavy emphasis on religion in the new curriculum. Ada was a dutiful student, but tried to explain to her tutor that she was not interested in arithmetic for its own sake, but rather, for its broader applications in capacities like physics. For those sorts of questions, she found a supportive mentor in her mother's friend Mary Somerville,

who just so happened to be one of 19th century England's most brilliant scientific minds. It was Mary, who, that same year, would bring Ada to a party hosted by one of her closest friends, Charles Babbage. Mary Somerville and another Mary, Mary Montgomery, would prove to be great influences on Ada's intellectual growth. Two of her mother's closest friends had taken the 18-year-old Ada under their wings and encouraged her love of science. Mary Montgomery brought Ada to lectures at intellectual hotspots like the Royal Institution, where Ada learned of the latest development in geology, chemistry, and natural philosophy. And the friendship of the Marys also allowed Ada to attend one of the famous Saturday

suarez hosted by Charles Babbage, for which, in order to get an invitation, you needed to possess, quote, beauty, rank, or intellect, at least as described by the wife of one scientist. Ada had met the mathematician before through Mary Somerville, but it was at one of his suarez, that the two would form the beginnings of their ultimately history-making working relationship. Despite Babbage being a year older than Ada's mother, the two had a number of things in common. They had both dealt with periods of intense illness in their youth, and where Ada had attempted to craft wings to fly, Charles had attempted to craft shoes to walk on water. Both of those are very Leonardo Dvinci in the movie ever after.

if you've seen it. When Ada and Babbage met, he attempted to delight his young guest with his Silver Lady automaton, but to his surprise, Ada was instead interested in another invention on display, a small portion of the steam-powered computing machine Babbage had been ambitiously trying to build for years. Another guest remarked how Miss Byron, young as she was, understood it's working and saw the great beauty of the invention. Ada was consumed by the idea of it. Quote, I'm afraid that when a machine or a lecture

or anything of the kind comes my way, I have no regard for time, space, or any other ordinary obstacle. Ada wrote to Somerville some months later. Annabella saw some value in the machine, but she was wary of her daughter's intense passion for it. Around this time, Annabella had a friend provide her with a 100% scientifically sound,

nothing to question here, phrenology reading of Ada's skull? As noted by Seymour, the reading, quote, confirmed Lady Byron's fears. Her daughter's intelligence was considerable, but it was of an impetuous and willful kind. Don't you hate when the bumps on your skull reveal that? While Ada continued to be under the tutelage of Her mother's tutor, Somerville, and Babbage took on Ada as an unofficial pupil as well.

It was during this time that Babbage began to conceptualize the machine that would ultimately come to be known as Babbage's analytical engine. However, it was also during this time that Ada began to show signs of extreme fatigue, and she ultimately listened to Somerville's advice to take a step back from me. her studies. What was a woman to do with newfound free time? Why, of course, get married. The match was set up by Somerville. Lord William King was a friend of her son from Trinity College, Cambridge, ironically Byron's alma mater, and Lord William King fancied himself something of a byronic figure. When he and Ada were introduced at a ball, he found himself not just infatuated with the legend of Ada's late father, but with Ada herself. They danced all night and a few months

later they were engaged. The couple married in 1835, and while I don't want to dive too deeply into their married life for the sake of time, I would once again be remiss if I didn't share a portion of Ada's writing with you. Early in their relationship, the couple apparently referred to each other with avian nicknames, which I find very sweet given Ada's history. with wings. William was the crow. Ada was the bird, and they often called Ada's mother Annabella the hen. When a newly pregnant Ada spent some time visiting her mother away from her husband, she wrote to him with a new ornithological nickname, her dear cock. I want my cock at night to keep me warm. Absolutely no notes, Ada, beautiful work. Your father wishes he could have written

something so beautiful and so poetic. The kings were apparently a very good-looking couple and very much not afraid to show how much they thought that of each other. When Ada and William gave the hen the honor of choosing the name of their newborn son, it may surprise you to hear what Annabella answered. Byron. Grace had come with the passage of time. Annabella held more affection for her late husband as she aged. And with Ada grown and married, it seems she feared less and less the risk of Byron's madness ruining her.

A few years into the marriage, namely when Princess Victoria became Queen Victoria in 1837, William and Ada became the Earl and Countess of Lovelace, reviving a title from Byron's side of the family that had become extinct a century prior. Ada was not particularly interested in being a countess, however, and by 1840 she sought to resume her intellectual pursuits, something she found her husband didn't quite share her passion

for. Quote, I hope you are bearing me in mind, she wrote in a letter to Charles Babbage that year. I mean, my mathematical interests. You know this is the greatest favor anyone can do me. Perhaps none of us can estimate how great. Who can calculate to what it might lead? Am I too imaginative for you? I think not.

Ada's dear mentor, Mary Somerville, had recently relocated to Italy with her family as her health declined, and Ada was seeking a new tutor to guide her curiosity. Babbage connected her with Augustus DeMorgan, the English mathematician now remembered for his formulations known as DeMorgan's laws. It was De Morgan who refined the now 24-year-old Ada's mathematical potential. As an older student, a married mother, Ada was learning how to dedicate herself to her improvement in practical ways, grasping in her own words, quote, the importance of not being

in a hurry. Despite Ada's newfound groundedness, she still couldn't shake her fascination with the analytical engine Babbage had been working on. In January of 1841, she wrote to Babbage, quote, You have always been a kind and real and most invaluable friend to me, and I would that I could in any way repay it, though I scarcely dare to exalt myself as to hope, however humbly, that I can ever be intellectually worthy of attempting to serve you. It was around this time that Ada's mood began to shift again back within the realms of the mad and the poetical. She told De Morgan that the mathematical forms they were studying

reminded her of the fairies she had read about in fiction. She wrote a letter to her mother that sounded not unlike those about flying as a youth. Only this time the letter was detailing her belief that she had intuited that in the future she would be able to be able to be able to be. to build an apparatus that would allow her to see, quote, anything that a being not actually dead can see and know. It's possible that this bout of slightly delusional thinking was brought on by learning that her cousin, Madora Lee, was in fact her half-sister,

likely the product of Lord Byron and his half-sister, Augusta, and their incestuous relationship. quote, I am not in the least astonished, Ada wrote to her mother after the revelation, quote, in fact, you merely confirm what I have for years and years felt scarcely a doubt about, but should have considered it most improper in me to hint to you that I in any way suspected. Despite that cool reaction, in other writings, we can see that for Ada, learning that she was not, in fact, the great Lord Byron's, only heir, spurred in her a great need to prove herself, perhaps to surpass her father's achievements.

She even considered turning to poetry. Quote, it will be poetry of a unique kind, far more philosophical and higher in its nature than ought the world has perhaps yet seen, end quote. In regards to the incest of it all, Ada blamed Augusta more than her own father, imagining that she had been the instigator. Ada did find a way to publish poetry of a unique kind. In 1842, Luigi Federico Menebrae, a professor of mechanics, who ultimately became the seventh prime minister of Italy,

published a paper on Babbage's analytical engine in French. The editor of a London-based journal approached one of Babbage's friends regarding his want for a translation, and Ada was immediately referred to for the job. Despite being in bad health at the time, as she increasingly was in adulthood, Ada eagerly accepted, finally getting her chance to be involved in any capacity with the project.

In addition to writing an excellent translation, Babbage himself apparently proposed that Ada add her own thoughts on the project in the paper's notes. In his conclusion, Menabreya asked, quote, who can foresee the consequences of such an invention? Well, Ada had an answer, one you heard at the top of this episode, the, quote, vast, new powerful language. Menabreya's paper was only originally around 8,000 words.

Ada's clocked in at 20,000. The writer James Essinger in his book Ada's algorithm comments on the significance of her notes. quote, Ada is seeking to do nothing less than invent the science of computing and separate it from the science of mathematics. What she calls the science of operations is indeed in effect computing. Unlike Babbage, Ada saw the practical uses of the analytical engine and foresaw the digitization of music as CDs or synthesizers and their ability to generate music, end quote. That last bit of the passage about music refers to a part of Ada's notes, I consider worth reading aloud, while you, the listener, recall that she was writing this in 1842. The computer, Ada argues, quote, might act upon other things besides number,

where objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." End quote. Ada's understanding of computing is bettered by her understanding of and passion for music, that began as a child. In the same vein, her understanding of computing

was equally bettered by her understanding of language itself. She wrote, quote, this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship, which visibly or invisibly, consciously,

or unconsciously to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst. It's downright philosophical, and in a more personal sense regarding Ada's own experience, it contradicts the idea that one must be imaginative or logical. To understand the natural world is to understand humanity and vice versa.

What ultimately led to Ada's recognition today as the first computer programmer was not her philosophical perspective on the potential of a computing device, but an algorithm called NoteG. I'll let Essinger explain its significance far more intelligently than I would be able to. Quote, Note G is highly complex juggling mathematics and technology. Most important of all, it is, in effect, a program containing instructions for a computer. While NoteG isn't a program you can execute today, it is instead an instruction for how the analytical engine would theoretically execute it. Those in the programming community thus debate whether or not it can actually be considered the first computer program, but there is no doubt it was a pioneering line of thinking. Ada initially didn't consider putting her name on her work at all,

but later settled on signing as AAL at the suggestion of her husband. Notably, this pen name was genderless, which was Ada's intention. AAL proudly presented her mother with her notes, which she called her firstborn. Quote, he will make an excellent head of, I hope, a large family of brothers and sisters, she said. Annabella was extremely proud of her daughter, boasting herself as, quote, mother of Ada,

which she said might be, quote, as good a passport to posterity if I am to have one, as the wife of Byron. Though Ada published the notes simply under her initials, it quickly became known among London society that Lord Byron's brilliant daughter was the author, and she soon was a well-regarded name in the scientific community. Tragically, Ada's health only began to decline further, and her notes would end up being her

only published work. She would live for less than a decade after her notes publication, during which the state of her health ebbed and flowed. This is not to say that Ada didn't still live a life during those years. There was gambling, there was infidelity, and there was ultimately an unknown deathbed confession so juicy that her husband left in her final hours. But unfortunately, we just have to speculate on what exactly that confession was. Ada died of uterine cancer on November 27, 1852, when she was 36 years old. Many have tried over the years to discredit Ada's work, and stick around for the epilogue to hear more about that. but today her impact as a visionary far ahead of her time is undeniable.

In Miranda Seymour's book, In Byron's Wake, she astutely compares Ada's work to that of her father's friend Mary Shelley, writing, quote, Neither woman changed the world in which they lived. Uniquely, both Lovelace and Shelley foresaw the role that technology might have to play in transforming a world they never knew. Perhaps it wasn't quite delusion when Ada told her mother that one day she could be able to see, quote, anything that a being not actually dead can see and know. That's the story of Ada Lovelace's technological achievements, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit more about her legacy. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.

So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend Janet. Hey. We have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips, wider.

This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they had a bogo. Well, then you got it. Do you want a white collar or something here?

Just take it. Oh, what are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a rap album? Oh, I would. Come on. Could you imagine? I would buy it.

Cut through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You're lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on. Oh. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcasts, soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. This is my best friend Janet. And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later. We're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips. Wider. This is a podcast. We're recording it

as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drink. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they had a bogo. Well, then you got it. Do you want a white collar or something here? Just take it. What are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a rap album?

I would buy it. Cut through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You're lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on. Oh.

Oh. Listen to soccer moms on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. you get your podcasts. It is no exaggeration, wrote the Babbage historian Bruce Collier, to say that she was a manic depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents and a rather shallow understanding of Charles Babbage and the analytical engine. There is a history of valid debate within the scientific community as to whether or not Ada's algorithm constitutes a computer program,

or whether or not she was the first computer programmer. But comments, like the one made above, have also not been uncommon throughout history, comments that pretty much boil down to misogyny. Quote, as people realized how important computer programming was, there was a greater backlash and an attempt to reclaim it as a male activity, says Valerie Aurora, the executive director of the Ada Initiative, a nonprofit organization that arranges conferences and training programs to elevate women working in math and science.

In order to keep that wealth, she told the New Yorker and power in a man's hand, there's backlash to try to redefine it as something a woman didn't do and shouldn't do and couldn't do. Since 2009, Ada Lovelace Day has been celebrated on the second Tuesday of October, with the goal to, quote, raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering, and, let's be English here for Ada, maths. In 2013, when the New Yorker piece quoted above was written, a, quote, Ada Love Lace Editathon was being hosted at my alma mater, Brown University, where volunteers were invited to improve Wikipedia entries for female scientists. universities continue to host various Ada Lovelace Day conferences and events each year, and last year, the official Ada Lovelace Day organizers hosted their annual Science Cabaret at the Royal Institution, where Mary Montgomery used to bring a teenage Ada Lovelace to broaden her mind.

Noble Blood is a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noami Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane, and executive producers Aaron Manky, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio,

visit the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcasts presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. This is my best friend, Janet. And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips.

This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They had a bogo. Well, then you got it. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

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