Today, March 24^th, is Ada Lovelace Day – a day of international blogging devoted to celebrating the technological excellence of women. 

Augusta Ada King née Byron, Countess of LovelaceToday, bloggers around the world are posting about inspirational woman technologists, thus raising the visibility of women in various technological professions, and hopefully contributing to the creation of an environment where women feel more comfortable and valued in these fields of study and work.  Although women’s participation in these areas is gradually on the increase, we still lag far behind men - a major concern in a world where social, cultural, political, and economic interactions and power are increasingly mediated and structured by technology.  If women are not participating in the creation and maintenance of our increasingly technological environment, then it is inevitable that our relative lack of power and privilege will persist.  To borrow a terminology Lovelace would have likely approved of, women need to code themselves into a better and more empowered future – as with speech, we can’t continue to allow others to code for us.

Ada Lovelace

So who was Ada Lovelace? The only legitimate child of the Romantic poet (and libertine), Lord Byron, Augusta ‘Ada’ Byron was born in 1815, and was raised by her mother, Anne Millbanke, after her parents separated.  (She later became Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, through her marriage to William King, the first Earl of Lovelace.) She was apparently somewhat of a failure in the eyes of Byron, in that she was not the expected son and heir, and her parents separated soon after her birth. This pretty much confirms the impression that I got in my English Lit. degree – that the Romantics might have been pretty good at the whole poetry thing, but some of them have been romanticised as much more attractive figures than they actually were - see Shelley and Wordsworth for more examples of bounderism.

Millbank and Byron’s separation was not amicable – she accused him of insanity, and later discovered he had a child with his half-sister, amongst various other illegitimate offspring.  In an attempt to rid Ada of any lingering patriarchal influence, Millbank ensured she was extremely well educated, particularly in mathematics.  It was quickly obvious that Lovelace had a rare gift in this arena, with one her tutors, Augustus de Morgan, opining that she was capable of becoming “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence”, (which, indeed, she did).

At age 17, she was introduced to Charles Babbage through a mutual acquaintance, and continued to engage with him both socially and academically, through his work on his ‘Difference’ and ‘Analytical Engines’. These engines are widely credited as being the first mechanical computers, and Babbage regarded as the ‘father of the computer’. Although the Engines were never fully constructed in Babbage’s lifetime, both designs have since been proved functional.  While the Difference Engine was a special purpose calculating machine, the Analytical Engine was different in that it could be programmed to perform different functions using Jacquard punch cards. These punch cards could control a mechanical calculator, and the Engine design incorporated several features integral to modern programming and computing, such as sequential control, branching, and looping.

A completed Difference EngineIn the year spanning 1842-1843, Lovelace translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrae’s memoir on the Analytical Engine, and added notes (which exceeded the length of the actual memoir).  These contained a complete methodology for calculating a set of Bernoulli numbers with the Engine using punch cards – effectively, the world’s first computer programme. Her notes also detail her vision of computers going beyond mere number-crunching, speculating that “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”.  There is also some suspicion that she suggested the use of punch cards in the Analytical Engine to Babbage, as her notes show a keen understanding of Jacquard’s loom system.  Babbage, impressed with Lovelace’s intellect and work, dubbed her the ‘Enchantress of Numbers’:

Forget this world and all its troubles and if

possible its multitudinous Charlatans – every thing

in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

Since her death, Lovelace’s remarkable achievements have been used to celebrate the participation and achievements of women in computing and other technical arenas. In honour of the Enchantress of Numbers, and in solidarity with the worldwide blog-initiative happening today, I hope you enjoy reading about my personal woman tech hero, and remember and support the countless other women, past, present and future, who keep Ada’s legacy alive.

Delia Derbyshire

My Mum is a fan of science fiction.  Happily, I never stood a chance – some of my first ‘media memories’ are of watching scifi of various kinds with her and my Dad.  It quite frequently terrified me, but sitting there, trying to hide it because I so desperately wanted to see the rest of whatever it was we were watching, is probably at least partially responsible for my adult pokerface.  I can remember my revolted fascination with Jabba the Hutt, wondering whether getting frozen hurt Han Solo or if it happened too quickly for that, and my complete and utter terror of the Sarlacc. Apparently (and I don’t remember this, but I wonder if I’m blocking it out because it’s so incredibly nerdy), my mini-critic’s opinion of Space Odyssey: 2001 was that it was pretty good, but that didn’t they know you can’t hear sound in space? (ahh, that eternal quibble of scifi fans everywhere).

One of the strongest of these proto-fannish memories is of a piece of music. An unmistakeable, eerie, piece of music, that still gives me goosebumps, even today.  And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one.

du-du-du-dun, du-du-du-dun,

du-du-du-dun, ooo-ooo-oooooh…

Yes, the Dr. Who theme song. The one so cool and so catchy that it makes you sing it even though you can’t actually sing it.  Sounding like an idiot is OK in the pursuit of Dr. Who fandom.  The song has been re-arranged and re-recorded multiple times, but it’s my opinion (and that of other nerds I know) that the 1963 original is vastly superior to all other versions. (If you haven’t already, I strongly suggest you get out some of the early Dr. Who. The psychedelic opening credits and Dalek city made out of what looks like cardboard boxes in storyline 002, ‘The Daleks’, are also not to be missed)

OK, so where am I going with this?  You will have noticed that the credits on the YouTube video are for Ron Grainer. Not A Woman. This is a tragedy.  Ron Grainer composed the score (asking for such vaguely described elements as ‘sweeps’, ‘swoops’, ‘wind clouds’ and ‘wind bubbles’, but it was a woman named Delia Derbyshire, working in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who realised it.  Grainer is on record as having been so amazed with what her end result was that he asked ‘Did I do that?’, to which she (rather over modestly, many might say) replied ‘Most of it’. Despite Grainer seeking to get her co-composer credits (and thus royalties), the BBC wanted to keep the members of the Workshop anonymous, and prevented him from doing so.

Delia DerbyshireI’m not a musician, but I’m a big electronic music fan. And like most electronic or tech industries, women are massively underrepresented in this genre of music. So the idea that Derbyshire, working with analogue equipment and music concrète techniques – no fancy digital synthesisers around in 1963 – managed to make this stunning piece of music (and many others), completely and utterly blows my mind. Sure, it was London, and the women’s liberation movement had begun, but I suspect there was a still a fair amount of workplace sexism.  And I'm pretty sure little girls born in 1937 weren't regularly being brought up to think that being a electronic music pioneer was an appropriate or viable career path.   This, coupled with the innovation and imagination requited to build a piece of music like this using the technology available, makes Derbyshire’s achievement quite remarkable.  The following description (which does a better job than I could of explaining the process) gives a pretty good idea of just what was involved:

Each and every note was individually created by cutting, splicing, speeding up and slowing down segments of analogue tape containing recordings of a single plucked string, white noise, and the simple harmonic waveforms of test-tone oscillators which were used for calibrating equipment and rooms, not creating music. The swooping melody and pulsating bass rhythm was created by manually adjusting the pitch of oscillator banks to a carefully-timed pattern. The rhythmic hissing sounds, "bubbles" and "clouds", were created by cutting tape recordings of filtered white noise.

Once each sound had been created, it was modified. Some sounds were created at all the required pitches direct from the oscillators, others had to be repitched later by adjusting the tape playback speed and re-recording the sound onto another tape player. This process continued until every sound was available at all the required pitches. To create dynamics, the notes were re-recorded at slightly different levels.

Each individual note was then trimmed to length by cutting the tape, and stuck together in the right order. This was done for each "line" in the music - the main plucked bass, the bass slides (an organ-like tone emphasising the grace notes), the hisses, the swoops, the melody, a second melody line (a high organ-like tone used for emphasis), and the bubbles and clouds. Most of these individual bits of tape making up lines of music, complete with edits every inch, still survive.

This done, the music had to be "mixed". There were no multitrack tape machines, so rudimentary multitrack techniques were invented: each length of tape was placed on a separate tape machine and all the machines were started simultaneously and the outputs mixed together. If the machines didn't stay in sync, they started again, maybe cutting tapes slightly here and there to help. In fact, a number of "submixes" were made to ease the process - a combined bass track, combined melody track, bubble track, and hisses. Eventually, the piece was finished.

This combination of musical and technical skill, the contribution to an absolutely iconic scifi TV series – and I’d argue that the theme song adds significantly to this status – and the fact that Derbyshire was a woman working in what was, and still is, very much the man’s world of electronic music, is why she is my chosen heroine for Ada Lovelace Day. Sadly, she’s no longer with us, but every time I hear the Dr. Who theme song, I remember her.  And even though I don’t work in tech myself, she (and Lovelace) remind me that women working in these industries (and all other industries) have massive contributions to make. 

Until our participation equalises, the world is really and truly missing out.