In a recent poll celebrating women in science and technology, 19th Century tech maven Ada Lovelace was voted the most popular role model for women in those professions, which is pretty impressive as most people haven’t ever heard of her. However that’s looks set to change, as Production Weekly tweets that ‘Zooey Deschanel in talks to play Ada Lovelace in Enchantress Of Numbers. Bruce Beresford plans to direct the period drama this fall.’
Even in her day, some referred to Lovelace as the Enchantress Of Numbers, due to her ability to use them in unusal and innovative ways. Charles Babbage is renowned as the #father of the computer’ for his work on the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, but it was Lovelace who showed how they could practically be used.
While the Analytical Engine was never actually built, it laid down the groundwork for a machine you could programme using punch cards to do a succession of computations. However, while it was grounbreaking in its design (although too complex and expensive to build at the time), it was Lovelace who wrote the first programme that could actually have made use of what Babbage was suggesting, in order to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers.
So if Babbage is the father of computers, Lovelace is the mother of computer programming, as she wrote the first one. Indeed she was one of the few people in the world who actually understood Babbage’s concept.
However, as well as that noted achievement, she was quite a character in her own right and renowned for not allowing her status as a women hinder her, despite the strictures of Victorian society. This is perhaps not surprising, seeing as she was the daughter of Lord Byron, who himself wasn’t a big fan of convention. She tragically died of cancer aged only 36 in 1952.
You can certainly see why this woman who pushed forward the boundaries of technology in an age ruled by men would interest filmmakers, and the quirky Zooey Deschanel would seem a good choice to play her, with Driving Miss Daisy and Double Jeopardy director Bruce Beresford at the helm.