The first programmer wrote code for a machine that was never built
Walter Isaacson opens the history of computing with a countess and a poet's daughter — and uses her to demolish the lone-genius myth.
Ask most people who invented computing and you'll get one of a handful of men's names, usually mid-twentieth century, usually American. Walter Isaacson's The Innovators opens somewhere else entirely: London, the 1840s, and Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, translating and annotating a paper about Charles Babbage's never-completed Analytical Engine.
Lovelace's notes went further than translation. She sketched what's now recognized as the first published computer program — a method for the machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers — and, more strikingly, argued that such a machine could someday manipulate not just numbers but music, images, anything expressible as symbols. Babbage's engine was never built in her lifetime. She was writing software for hardware that didn't exist.
Isaacson uses her as the thesis, not just the opener: every major leap he traces afterward — the transistor, the internet, the personal computer — came out of teams, not solitary inventors, and the ones who tried to go it alone mostly failed to finish. His running example is the physicist who built a working circuit board for an early computer alone in an Iowa basement and never got it fully functioning, while a rival down the hall assembled a team of engineers and mathematicians and built the first general-purpose one.
Lovelace's real prediction wasn't artificial intelligence. It was that the future would belong to whoever could connect a poet's imagination to an engineer's patience — and that neither one gets there alone.