Loving the friendly face of Charles Babbage and his amazing inventions, I did a post on him many years ago. Recently, a reader from the Netherlands wrote me a very kind and informative email to share that Babbage was supported by the genuis of Ada Lovelace, Byron’s only legitimate daughter.
Ada has never been featured as a Regency Woman of Character primarily because she was born in 1815 and therefore belongs more to the early Georgian era. But there is an awesome primer on Ada and the Babbage Engine here: http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace/. She was the original computer code writer and has been lauded as the ‘prophet of the computer age’.
Although the calculating engine would not be realized in Babbage’s time (a version, to his specs, was final complete in 2002), the work of Babbage and others like Lovelace undoubtedly captured minds and imaginations enough to push us towards the advent of computing.
It is worth mentioning that Babbage worked on two different types of engines, Difference and Analytical. Difference Engine’s purpose was calculations while Analytical Engine is a more “general purpose programmable computing engine” and why he is often called the inventor of the computer (http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/engines).
