Ada Lovelace, Visionary

It’s hard to be a regular person when you’re the daughter of a famous revolutionary poet—Lord Byron! And yet, born in 1815 into a society where women had no say in things, Ada Lovelace hardly had a leg up when it came to doing great things! Despite a fragile constitution, Ada simply overflowed with imagination, turning passionately toward science. At age twelve, she set out to create a flying machine, taking inspiration from avian anatomy. Mathematics and mechanics proved a splendid way for her to explore the invisible worlds around her and explain the mysteries of nature. As a teen, her creative and ingenious mind brought her in close contact with such intellectual stars of the era as Charles Babbage, with whom she collaborated for over twenty years to design the first “difference engine,” an ancestor of the contemporary computer.

A century before the advent of the modern world, and against all expectations, it was a woman who becae the first programmer in all of history. After several portraits of forgotten women, Anne Loyer and Claire Gaudriot—who largely used her stylus and digitizer tablet for the illustrations—pay tribute to a woman without whom the world as we know it today would not exist.