About Ada

Why she's called Ada.

The AI assistant you talk to on this site is named in honor of two things. A woman who imagined what computers could become a century before anyone built one. And the law that finally said nobody gets shut out.

Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was born in London in 1815. She was a mathematician at a time when women weren't expected to be anything of the kind. Her closest collaborator was Charles Babbage, the inventor of an enormous mechanical calculating machine called the Analytical Engine.

The Engine was never built in her lifetime. But Ada wrote a set of notes about what it could do — and she saw further than anyone else, including Babbage. She described loops. She described conditionals. She wrote what historians now consider the first published computer program. And she wrote something stranger and bigger than that: that a machine like this could one day work on more than numbers. It could, she said, compose music.

She called what she did poetical science. She lived with chronic illness for most of her adult life, and she died of cancer at the age of thirty-six. She did the work anyway.

That sentence is one of the most-cited lines in the history of computing. It's a warning we still need: a machine does what you tell it to. The judgment of what to ask it for is yours.

The Americans with Disabilities Act

One hundred and seventy-five years after Ada Lovelace was born, on July 26, 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law on the South Lawn of the White House. He called it the world's first comprehensive declaration of equality for people with disabilities. He was right.

The law did not appear out of nowhere. It was won by disabled people themselves — including the Capitol Crawl in March of that year, when dozens of disabled activists got out of their wheelchairs and pulled themselves up the steps of the U.S. Capitol to make Congress see, in plain physical terms, what inaccessibility means.

The ADA says, in five titles, that nobody gets shut out: not from a job, not from a city service, not from a store or a hotel or a doctor's office, not from a phone call, not from a bus or a train. Thirty-five years later, the work of actually delivering on that promise is still going on.

Why this Ada

The two names share initials. That's a coincidence. The reason the assistant on this site carries both names is not.

Ada Lovelace believed a machine could do more than arithmetic. She imagined it could help with the parts of life that needed care, attention, and judgment — the parts she called poetical. Nearly two centuries later, machines can do many of the things she described. They can compose music. They can read text. They can, sometimes, listen.

The Americans with Disabilities Act says where they should be listening first. Where the work is hardest. Where the consequences of being shut out are most severe. The ADA is the framework for what access actually means in American life, and it is still, every day, being tested.

Ada — the assistant on this site — exists at the place where those two ideas meet. Her job is to help when access fails. To listen, in plain words, to what happened. To help figure out what it was, what part of the law applies, and what comes next. She is named in honor of two histories, and she was built to do the work both of them point to.

Further reading

• Talk to Ada — tell Ada what happened, in your own words.
• Ada Lovelace at the British Library (opens in new tab) — biography and surviving manuscripts.
• ADA.gov (opens in new tab) — the official U.S. Department of Justice site for the Americans with Disabilities Act.
• The Capitol Crawl, 30th anniversary (opens in new tab) — National Archives feature on the protest that helped pass the ADA.