The New York Times laments that its obituaries have been dominated by white men since 1851 and decides to rectify this by eulogizing the overlooked Ada Lovelace — who wasn’t actually overlooked in her lifetime, and whose death made the front page of the New York Times on December 15, 1852:
Nor has Ada, the Countess Lovelace, been ignored over the last 40 or 50 years. In the late 1970s the Pentagon named after her its new programming language Ada that it tried to impose on all defense contractors.
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The real Ada was, like her friend Charles Babbage, a major celebrity in her own time. It hardly hurt that she was the only legitimate child of the most famous man in Europe in the post-Waterloo era, the poet Lord Byron. Nor did it hurt that she was born an aristocrat and married an aristocrat.
In particular, her having a rather masculine turn of intellect made her more renown during her life.
In fact, when an 1844 bestseller anticipating Darwin’s theory of evolution was published under a pseudonym, Ada Lovelace was one of the prime suspects. This is where the story takes a very Steve Sailer turn:
As it turned out to the surprise of most, the real author was a hard-working but fairly obscure Scottish journalist and golf course architect named Robert Chambers, who had come up with the idea that everything is the product of “development” while recovering from overwork by playing golf daily on The Old Course at St. Andrews, a links that had developed over centuries of play without much in the way of intelligent design until about Chambers’ day.
The reason the contributions to the theory of computer science by Lovelace (and Babbage) was overlooked in late 19th and early 20th century was of course because there were no computers. Babbage’s famous (at the time) and well-funded Analytical Engine project had failed. Similarly, nobody much cared about Leonardo da Vinci’s helicopter sketch until after the helicopter had been invented.
It would be interesting to look into whether Lovelace’s idea that her friend Babbage’s engine could turn into a general purpose computer contributed to Babbage’s notorious problem with specification creep. If he’d been able to say Enough! to what his engine was supposed to do, he might have gotten it finished. But I don’t know if Lovelace’s ideas worsened Babbage’s failings.
Interestingly, Chambers was mostly overlooked during his own lifetime (not revealing himself as the author of the bestseller until decades later), nor since then, although Secord’s book does much to revive the man’s memory.
The link between Chambers’ evolutionary thinking and his obsession with links golf courses that had originally evolved without a designer has likewise been forgotten. This is even though Chambers’ great-grandson, golf architect Sir Guy Campbell, cowrote a history of golf in the 1950s with Darwin’s grandson Bernard Darwin, spelling out how the St. Andrews links had evolved over the eons.
One could imagine an alternative universe in which golf courses are a prime subject for intellectualizing and thus Chambers is a famous figure in intellectual history. But that’s not the one we live in.