[ID: Screenshot of tumblr tags reading “please op i am desperate for the context.” End ID.]
Lord George Gordon Byron was an English poet in the early 1800s.
He wrote several narrative poems that influenced the gothic genre and was a HUGE fucking slut. HUGE. This bisexual mess slept with so many fucking people it was insane, no gender was safe. Unfortunately that “no one was safe” mentality did not work out well for him bc there were a LOT of rumors that he impregnated his half-sister.
His only child from a legitimate marriage was from his wife, Lady Anne Isabella Noel Byron, who straight-up left him after a year. You know how divorce was uncommon in the 1800s? His wife was just so fed up with him that she did not care and left when her daughter was five weeks old.
This daughter was named Ada and would become known as Ada Lovelace.
Byron signed the separation papers and then left the country to have sex elsewhere and would later die when Ada was eight.
During that time if a couple divorced, usually the Dad would get full custody, so just in case he tried anything Lady Byron made sure to play the devoted and overattentive mother.
Lady Byron was absolutely paranoid that her daughter would become an insane gothic mess like her dad so she decided the only thing to do would be to make sure she did not become a Poet™. So she heavily encouraged Ada’s interests in science and mathematics.
Around the 1830-40s, Ada met Charles Babbage through a mutual friend and he showed her his prototype for a mechanical calculator. She got absolutely obsessed with this machine and began helping him out with it to the point where her notes on it became more extensive than his.
She also added notes to a translation of a paper on this engine that is considered to be the first published algorithm.
These notes on the engine and translation became the basis for computer programming.
She’s considered The First Computer Programmer™
So, because Lord Byron was a little slut and his wife wanted their daughter to Not Be, we now have to deal with tumblr discourse. Thank you and goodnight.
gummygunk
tangentwithtanner
annaxmalina
theartofmadeline
titsay
