The Teenage Girl Who Wrote the First Computer Program

In 1843, a 27-year-old woman wrote the world's first computer program — for a computer that did not exist. Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, translated a paper about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and added notes three times longer than the paper itself. In Note G, she published an algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers — the first program written for a general-purpose machine — and a vision of machines composing music and art a century before computers existed. In this documentary we follow the whole arc: the poet's daughter raised on mathematics, the unbuilt Engine, the Notes that became the first software, the famous Jacquard loom comparison, and the century of obscurity before the US Department of Defense named a programming language "Ada" in her honor in 1979. 🔔 Subscribe to Stories Behind History for new cinematic history documentaries — forgotten events, vanished expeditions, hidden power, and the extraordinary people history left behind. Chapters: 00:00 The Program for a Machine That Didn't Exist 01:06 The Poet's Daughter 02:14 The Engine 03:17 The Translation That Became the Book 04:29 The Bernoulli Algorithm 06:03 The Vision 07:16 Death and Disappearance 08:36 The Rediscovery 📺 Watch next in "Forgotten Geniuses & Inventions": • The Doctor They Called Mad for Washing His Hands (Ignaz Semmelweis) • A 2,000-Year-Old Computer Found in a Shipwreck (the Antikythera mechanism) #AdaLovelace #FirstProgrammer #HistoryDocumentary More from our channels: Circus Powers:    / @circuspowers   UnBox Luxury Motors:    / @unboxluxurymotors   The Financial Choice:    / @thefinancialchoice