Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and Anne Isabella, known for her contributions to modern computing, despite her father's controversial past. Ada's mother, a math nerd, shaped her logical and disciplined upbringing. Lord Byron's affairs with Lady Caroline Lamb and Augusta Lee added to his scandalous reputation. Ada's story connects to her parents' contrasting personalities, with Lord Byron's emotional nature and Lady Byron's rationality influencing her remarkable achievements in STEM.

What if I told you the person who predicted modern computers lived 200 years ago, and almost no one took her seriously? Our story today is about Ada Lovelace, who spent her whole life trying to become nothing like her father, and ended up becoming something the world has never seen before. This is Historically Unsupervised. Y'all, I cannot believe that it has been eight whole weeks of episodes so far. The time has just flown by. I start a new job next week, and I know I'm going to be keeping myself pretty busy with that and this, but I kind of like it that way.

Some people like having free time, and I think I tell myself that I like having free time to be bored and do nothing, but in reality, I don't do well with not keeping myself busy. So I'm really glad that I came up with the concept of this podcast, because it forces me to not watch too much reality TV and sit on my phone, and it forces me to kind of do something that's actually good for my brain.

I also like to keep myself interested in the things that I think are cool, so researching these topics are just really fun for me, and I do enjoy my free time of learning more about weird, cool, and interesting history. I also just love the fact that I can tell people I have a podcast, a history podcast at that, because being able to tell people that I have a history podcast has created this fun character trait about me.

I think it's just way more fun to be a little interesting than super basic and do everything that everybody else does, and I get it. Having a podcast is pretty basic, but I'm hoping that this one is not totally niche, but niche enough to where it becomes a cool girl personality trait rather than just straight up, oh, she's just some other girl with a podcast. Forgive me if you stayed with me for that whole spiel, because I think I literally just went from point A to point B to point C in a matter of two minutes.

I know I just kind of rambled on about literally anything just now, but to kind of sum it up, I thought it would be interesting and fun to share a story that kind of connects to our first week's episode. If you didn't listen to episode number one, I definitely recommend you give it a listen, or just listen to all of them. They're all great. I think so. Other people have said they're pretty great. Hopefully they're not lying to my face.

I don't think they are, but if you haven't listened, I definitely think that you should. In episode one, we talk about the affair between Lady Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron. Lord Byron, actually, the more I look into him, the more I realize that he has a lot to unpack about his life. His affair with Lady Caroline Lamb was literally just the smallest little snippet, but I want you to place yourself back into the realm of Lord Byron, because today we're talking about Lord Byron's child.

Although Lord Byron was pretty intense and controversial, he was actually kind of this brilliant poet. I think it'll be really fun to get into his daughter and all of the amazing things that she did. This is the first episode of my series, Secrets of STEM, where we kind of go into, if you don't already know what STEM means, science, technology, engineering, and math type of stories. I know it sounds really boring when you say the words science, technology, engineering, and math, but I promise you there actually is a lot of really cool and interesting stuff, especially behind the scenes stories that you might not really talk about in class or things that you may have learned when you were in your high school biology class.

This makes it a lot more fun, and I probably could have roped this into medical stuff as well, but I feel like there's just so much to unpack in the medical world of history, and so I had to make that its own series, which is My Healing Era, which I have already done for Episode 5. Anyway, I'm honestly not 100% sure that my brain is fully functioning this morning, and so I think I really just rambled about everything under the sun, so if you were able to keep up with me these past couple minutes, kudos to you.

But if you remember our brilliant poet from Episode 1 and his affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, just know that he was one of the most controversial men in Europe at the time, yet he was such a brilliant mind, and he ended up producing another really brilliant mind, so I say, let's get right into it. So today we'll be talking about Ada Lovelace, but to kind of set the story up and set the scene, I think it would be so vital to get into Ada's parents.

Now, we already know a little bit about Ada's father, Lord Byron. Lord Byron was the leading figure of the Romantic Movement. Now, I learned about Lord Byron in my high school English class, but we never really got into who Lord Byron was, and I kind of wish that we had, but I doubt that a whole lot of his controversies and life were appropriate for a high school class, so maybe that's why not, but I still think it would have been a fun side project or something.

So if you know him from something like an English class, you'll know that he was this brilliant poet, but he was also quite known for his drama and controversy around Europe as well. So if you remember our girl, Lady Caroline Lamb, who ended up kind of becoming one of history's first crazy ex-girlfriends, she was not the only woman that he was having affairs with. Apparently, he was having numerous affairs with multiple women, multiple married women, so Lord Byron certainly got around and had his fun.

Some even said that there were rumors that he would have relationships and affairs with married men and women, so the tea is certainly piping hot. But out of all the affairs and relationships that Lord Byron had, his most shocking allegation was of a relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Lee. Now, you know, as your lady whistled down, I have to admit that none of these rumors were confirmed, of course. However, the word got around, and Lord Byron's reputation was severely damaged by his relationships with these married people, as well as his half-sister.

So I guess at the time in Europe, Lord Byron was this hot commodity that everybody just had to have, and I guess that makes sense why he was one who inspired characters of the Byronic hero, such as Edward Cullen, Jack Sparrow, Anakin Skywalker. Like, everybody knew that he was deeply flawed, but everybody still wanted a slice of Lord Byron. But even though Lord Byron got around, he eventually found a Lady Byron. Now, Lady Byron's name is Anne Isabella Noel, eventually becomes Byron, and she had a reputation to be a little bit different than Lady Caroline Lamb.

Anne Isabella was known to be highly educated. They even nicknamed her the Princess of Parallelograms. She was kind of a math nerd at the time. And I kind of think the nickname the Princess of Parallelograms is like super cute, but I guess at the time it was not considered a compliment. It was really meant to mock her love for math, kind of like in a cheesy 80s movie where the jock starts calling out all the nerds.

She was known to be logical, disciplined, pretty morally strict. She was a bit of a square, but um, she was also deeply religious, and she believed in reason over emotion. Meanwhile, we know our friend Lord Byron was quite emotional, and I mean, he was a poet. Hello. Of course he was emotional. Being emotional was literally his life's work, and it's funny that he had an affair with Lady Caroline Lamb because she was also known to be a very passionate and emotional individual.

So if you did listen to Episode 1, think the complete opposite of Lady Caroline Lamb, and that was Lady Byron. Because Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb were actually probably very similar, which is why it was so heated and passionate, but Lord Byron needed somebody to ground him and put him back in his place. So Lord Byron and Lady Byron met in 1812, which if you at all remember our story from the first episode, that was also the year that Lady Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron also met and started having an affair.

This is all in the same year. So literally in the smack dab middle of his affair with Lady Caroline Lamb is when he meets Anne Isabella, who became Lady Byron. So I guess you really do meet people when you least expect it. If you remember it all from the first episode, this was in the middle of the peak of his fame. He was having an affair with Lady Caroline Lamb, writing poems, just overall having a grand old time.

He met Anne Isabella through aristocratic social circles, which was the dating pool at the time. Part of me thinks it might not be the worst idea in the world to tell everybody to delete their dating apps and we can start creating our own social circles all over again. So when Byron and Annabella met, Byron was initially interested in Annabella first. He was intrigued by her mind, which I'm also pretty sure is what he said about Lady Caroline Lamb.

So I guess he doesn't really have a type when it comes to personalities. Now, just like Lady Caroline Lamb, she was cautious of his reputation. I think we all know why at this point. And if you don't, you've got to go listen to the first episode. Basically, all of these women that are getting involved with Lord Byron are colorblind and see all of his red flags as green ones or just ignore them and continue on with their affairs anyway.