In one episode, Andrea Busque lends her voice to Élie Olivennes's words, taking us back to the evening of June 5, 1833, when British mathematician Charles Babbage (1791–1871) presented his first Difference Engine in fashionable London. Its creator was fascinated by its mechanisms, which could compute polynomial functions, but the audience was somewhat disappointed. Only one person truly grasped the machine's potential: Augusta Ada Byron (1815–1852), the 17-year-old daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron. It was the beginning of a collaboration that would lay the foundations of modern computing.
The podcast then turns to a more conventional biography of our heroine. In adulthood, domestic responsibilities curtailed her mathematical pursuits. But Babbage set about designing an Analytical Engine—a "steam-powered computer"! The new machine piqued Ada Lovelace's curiosity, and she devoted each evening to exploring it intellectually. In this context, she wrote what is now regarded as the first computer program in history!
Two other episodes are devoted to Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) and Alan Mathison Turing (1912–1954).
