Mar 24 2009
Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
As part of an international celebration of Ada Lovelace, the pioneering woman technologist and polymath, the daughter of poet Lord Byron and the very tolerant friend and admirer of the volatile Charles Babbage, I would like to salute not just one woman scientist or technologist but a whole bookful of Irish women. The book is the newly published Lab Coats and Lace: the Lives and Legacies of Inspiring Irish Women Scientists and Pioneers, edited by well known science journalist and broadcaster Mary Mulvihill. I just received my copy and there’s a fantastic assortment of essays in the book, which is a companion to Stars, Shells and Bluebells (also on Irish woman scientists) and targeted at secondary school students but a good read for anyone. As one of the goals of Ada Lovelace Day is to celebrate women in science and encourage girls to consider such a fascinating career themselves, the book is especially appropriate!
On a more personal note, I was lucky enough to be asked by Mary to contribute a chapter to the book on a woman I actually met a few years back, the charming and feisty Donegal-born Kathleen “Kay” McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, who passed away in 2006. I’d like to make her my main tech woman to highlight for Ada Lovelace Day. Kay was one of the group of very bright, steadfast women who were the world’s first computer programmers, tasked with programming ENIAC, a WWII-era behemoth the size of a train car now credited with being the world’s first electronic computer. With most of the men off fighting, it was women maths graduates like Kay McNulty who were brought in to figure out how to get a computing machine to run its problems.
Recognition of their contributions came very late — only in the past decade, and even then, begrudgingly. At one of the major anniversary celebrations of ENIAC, Kay was invited not in her own right as one of that pivotal group of women programmers (women who invented some of the basics of programming and two of the first programming languages), but as the widow of John Mauchly, who along with J. Presper Eckert invented ENIAC and created one of the first computer companies after the war.
Kay McNulty came back to Ireland several years ago and gave a wonderful, informal talk on her time working on ENIAC and some of the politics of the time, as well as some punchy views of what it was like to be a woman working in a very male dominated field. Fortunately things have changed for the better, and girls today who are interested in science and technology can look to role models like Kay McNulty and all the other fascinating women in Lab Coats and Lace. And of course, to Ada Lovelace herself.
You can see a neat mashup showing the location of posts made to celebrate Ada’s day here (though it doesn’t seem to be updating!). Disclaimer: Just in case anyone is wondering, I don’t make any dosh at all on the sale of this book! 
3 responses so far
[...] to Karlin Lillington for the nod, you can now read all about them in “lab coats and lace“, a celebration of [...]
[...] stories in the new book, or hear about them in a special podcast interview with myself and Karlin Lillington, who wrote the McNulty biography, conducted by consultant Krishna De specially for Ada Lovelace [...]
Sounds like a great book for women in the techology field!