In 1828, a 12-year-old girl calculated the ratio between a bird’s wingspan and body weight, drafted a book she called Flyology, and planned to fly across England using mechanical wings and steam power. Her mother was terrified, because this methodical child was Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter.

This episode traces how Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, fused poetry and cold mathematics into what she called poetical science, and became the first person to look at brass gears and see the blueprint for a modern computer, a full century before electronic machines existed.

• Her mother’s attempt to math away the Byron madness, the surveillance friends Ada nicknamed the Furies, and how suppression backfired into genius
• The 1833 meeting with Charles Babbage, who called her Lady Fairy and the Enchantress of Number
• Her Note G algorithm for Bernoulli numbers, widely cited as the first published computer program, and how she grasped looping and conditional branching
• Her leap from calculation to computation, predicting machines could compose music of any complexity
• The fierce historical debate over whether she truly invented programming, plus Lady Lovelace’s objection that Alan Turing debated a century later