Wendy Morton
Main Page: Wendy Morton (Conservative - Aldridge-Brownhills)(1 day, 18 hours ago)
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Lizzi Collinge
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and with Georgina that having role models and mentors is really important. One of Ada’s mentors was a woman called Mary Somerville, a scientist and polymath. It was Mary who introduced Ada to Charles Babbage, whose work would capture her interest and provide the inspiration for her most significant contributions.
Babbage was a professor of mathematics and a celebrity in the scientific world. He was a visionary, with countless unfinished plans for clockwork calculating machines. At the time, his fascination was his latest device, the analytical engine, a proposed improvement on his earlier and uncompleted difference engine. The analytical engine, he said, would be able to perform any calculation set before it, but the patience of his parliamentary sponsors had worn thin. Having funded him to the tune of £1.7 million in today’s money, they refused to finance a second machine while the first was unfinished.
Babbage was therefore forced to look abroad. After he gave a lecture at the University of Turin, the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea wrote up his notes and published them in French. Charles Wheatstone then suggested that Ada translate them into English, as she was fluent in French and other languages. She showed the translation to Babbage, who was ecstatic, and he suggested that she add her own notes because as he put it, she understood the machine so well.
Ada’s footnotes tripled the paper’s original length, because she understood Babbage’s device, but she also saw further. She rightly saw it as what we would now call a general purpose computer. For Babbage, these machines were nothing more than calculators, but Ada saw past that. She understood that a machine capable of manipulating numbers—and of representing any value, from letters to musical notes—would have a grip on a world beyond mathematical calculation. Crucially, Ada’s vision for computing recognised that technology must be applied for, in her words, “the purposes of mankind.” Technology must serve humanity, not the other way around.
At the time, Ada’s ideas amounted to little more than a vision. Let us remember that she was working in the 19th century, before there were even any functional computers. Her work was not revisited until nearly a century later, when Alan Turing quoted her in his work.
Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)
The Ada Lovelace event held earlier this week in Parliament was an excellent way of highlighting for many of us the importance of women in manufacturing and STEM, but Ada Lovelace was clearly a visionary. Does the hon. Lady agree that we need to keep that visionary sense at the heart of all we do when encouraging the next generation of women into STEM? That means encouraging the further education sector to work with businesses and apprenticeship providers, such as In-Comm from Aldridge, whose representatives were at the event.
Lizzi Collinge
I absolutely agree with the right hon. Lady. Having that visionary view of science—looking beyond what is to what could be—is absolutely essential. The providers and the businesses that she talked about are essential to that.
Ada contributed to a debate that is extremely pertinent today when she discussed the possibility of machine intelligence back in the 1800s. She said:
“The Analytical Engine has no pretentions…to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform… Only when computers originate things should they be believed to have minds.”
That is in contrast to Alan Turing’s later thought that computers should be understood in terms of their ability to appear to think. He termed her thoughts “Lady Lovelace’s objection”, which I think is rather beautiful.
What developments would we have seen by now if we had understood earlier the potential that Ada saw? What developments do we still lose out on because we do not see the potential in women? The barriers keeping women and girls back from STEM do not just disadvantage them; they disadvantage all of us. The 2025 Lovelace report, written by Oliver Wyman in collaboration with the organisation WeAreTechWomen, found that the tech industry loses between £2 billion and £3.5 billion every year through a broken career framework that drives out talent, with women bearing the heaviest cost.