We have the impression that the world of technology has always been the environment for men, that the term “Nerds” does not even exist in the female environment, and that women are not that interested in this area and that only now women are looking for your space. But that’s not true at all, today I want to prove to you, dear reader, that many of the technologies we use until today were created by women. From the first computer program in history, to our WiFi. At a time when men were the vast majority in these areas, they showed their strength and intelligence.
We have to start with Ada Lovelace, or rather, Augusta Ada Byron King, but she was better known as “Countess de Lovelace”. Born in London (England) on December 10, 1815, daughter of the illustrious British poet of the time Lord Byron and Anabella (Lady Byron), after a month of her birth her parents separated and Anabella took her newborn daughter to live in Greece.
She always liked mathematics and at the age of 17 she met Mary Somerville, translator of the works of the French mathematician and physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace, or Marquis de Laplace. Somerville was very important in Ada’s life, always encouraging her in the world of mathematics, and it was at a dinner where Somerville invited Ada at age 19 to meet Charles Babbage, who was working on a calculation machine, later named the Analytical Engine.
At the age of 20 she married William Lord King, becoming Lady Lovelace in 1838. After giving birth to her first daughter, she was in poor health and returned to study mathematics with Augustus de Morgan, considered one of the pioneers in the creation of logic symbolic.
At the age of 28, married to the Count of Lovelace and mother of three children, Ada received an article by the Italian researcher Menabrea to be translated at Babbage’s request. The article was a summary of how Babbage’s own Analytical Engine would work. In addition to translating the document, she complemented it with personal notes and notes, which greatly increased the perception of how the machine could be used, tripling the size of the article. These additional notes showed instructions on how one could use this Analytical Engine. She even showed these notes to Babbage himself and suggested that the machine could even calculate Bernoulli numbers, produce complex music, accurate graphics and practical and theoretical application in mathematics.
However, at the age of 36, in very poor health, Lady Lovelace died of uterine cancer.
You may be asking me, she was very fond of math, but what was the importance of Ada Lovelace in technology? The instructions for using the analytical machine, or as we speak today in the computer world, this algorithm, is considered the first computer program, that is, Ada Lovelace is considered the first programmer in the world or mother of programming. Despite its short lifespan, her work was instrumental in arriving at the technology we have today. Alan Turing himself, known as the “father of modern computing”, makes reference to Lovelace’s work in his research and recognizes her importance in this area.
There is no lack of tributes to Lovelace, the United States Department of Defense created the ADA programming language in her honor in 1980. In 1981 the Association of Women in Computing created the Ada Lovelace Award and, finally, the Computing” created the Lovelace Medal.
Speaking of programming, we can’t forget her, Grace Murray Hopper, the so-called “COBOL grandma”.
She was born in 1906 in New York, United States. She graduated in Mathematics and Physics in 1928, finished her master’s degree in 1930 and completed her doctorate in mathematics in 1934.
When she was working on her doctorate in 1931, she taught math classes at Vassar College, but in 1943 she entered the United States Navy Naval Academy and graduated at the top of her class. Because of this, she became part of the programming team for the Mark I Computer, at the Bureau of Ships Computation Project, at Harvard University. The Mark I is also known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. In 1973 she became a captain in the Navy and retired in 1986, passing away 6 years later in 1992.
One of Grace’s curiosity is that one of the origin stories of the term “bug” in computing is attributed to her. It is very common even today, when we have a problem with our computers, to use the expression “deu bug” or “bugou tudo”, and countless other expressions that vary from the word “Bug”, which in English means insect. So why do we use that term? In 1945 the Harvard Mark II supercomputer was not working and Grace was investigating why. It is worth remembering that we are talking about the time when computers occupied an entire room, very different from today’s laptops, it was when she found a moth that got stuck in the computer, attracted by the lights and heat of the equipment and caused the failure. She did the debugging, that is, the removal of the insect.
She was also part of the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer) team, the first commercial computer manufactured and marketed in the USA. And it didn’t stop there, after working on this project, she created her own compiler, which translates a text program into computer language. This changed the idea that computers only did mathematical calculations.
Just what I’ve reported so far about Grace would guarantee a place in history, but remember that she had the nickname “COBOL grandma”? It was then that at the time, Admiral Grace, created a programming language called Flow-Matic, which was the basis of the COBOL language (Common Business Oriented Language), a language oriented to database processing. Even though she did not participate directly in the development of this language, she was instrumental in the creation of this new language, earning her the nickname “COBOL grandma”.
In her life Grace Hopper collected numerous honorary doctorates, as well as awards and honors. In 1998, the US Navy named a ship USS Hopper, its motto in Latin being “aude et effice”, which can be loosely translated as “dare to create” or “dare and do”.
And to end this tribute, let’s talk about Hedy Lamarr, considered the mother of the wireless internet. She was a famous Hollywood actress who escaped the Nazi regime in World War II.
Born in Austria in 1914, of Jewish descent, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, since childhood, was interested in machines and inventions. But her mother, being a pianist, influenced her daughter to follow the paths of the arts during her teenage years. In 1930, at the age of 16, she made her first appearance in a film and at the age of 18 she starred in the controversial feature film Ecstasy. That same year she married Fritz Mandl, owner of an armament factory and with connections to the Nazi government that had just come to power. In Hedwig’s own words, she became a prisoner in her own home and was forced to stop acting.
In 1937, tired of a failed marriage and also worried about the progress of the war, she leaves everything and flees Austria for London, England. From there she goes to the United States, where she manages to resume her acting career. For this new beginning she adopts the name of Hedy Lamarr, named after the late actress Barbara La Marr. Years later, she earns a stele on the famous “Walk of Fame” in Los Angeles.
The actress ended her career in the early 1960s. In 1966, renowned filmmaker Andy Warhol made the short film “Hedy” about the life of the actress. That same year Hendy launches his autobiography. In her last years of life, she lived a reclusive life in Orlando, where she died on January 19, 2000, aged 86.
But how did an actress become the mother of the wireless internet? Let’s remember that since childhood she had an interest in inventions. The story goes that in 1940, during a party, she meets composer George Antheil. They started playing songs together on the piano, Hedy was inspired at that time by the technology of the frequency hopping system: while the Antheil “transmitter” played the first chords, the “receiver” followed soon after.
The idea was to keep the sync even with both playing different keys. In 1942, the duo submitted their frequency hopping work to the US War Department. However, despite the excellent idea, it would not be possible, at the time, to put it into practice because it was difficult to implement in the middle of the Second World War. In 1962, when the patent had already expired, the device invented by Lamarr began to be used by US military troops in Cuba. Yet the actress’s invention remained unknown until 1997 when the Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded Hedy Lamarr for her contribution.
Technology has opened the door to wireless communications such as WiFi, CDMA (Used in cell phones) and Bluetooth. She and her friend, however, did not earn any money from their huge contribution.
In 1997 she and Antheil were recognized for the creation of the wireless communication system with the EFF Pioneer Award, the Oscar of Invention in the USA. The following year, she received the Viktor Kaplan Prize from the Austrian government for her contribution to science. An asteroid was named after her artistic name and last name in her honor.
These women show that we have the power to revolutionize history, even if we don’t deserve it, that’s why today I dedicate this space to all of you, warrior and feisty women and especially to the women who today work with technology, conquering more and more space which has always been mostly male. Let’s change the world for the better.
Happy women’s month to all of us!
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