Today, we’re going to hear the story of Ada Lovelace – a woman who saw the patterns and poetry in everything around her.

Have you ever felt different? Or that the way your brain worked was different? Like you were thinking something, no one else in the whole world was thinking?

That’s how Ada Lovelace felt, all the time. Her mind worked…the way it worked.  Some people decided she was very strange. Maybe even…weird. And, she kind of was. In the most magical way.

Ada wrote what many people consider, the first ever computer program…a hundred years before the first computer was even built.

But before that, she was a twelve year-old girl, who dreamt of flying.

Let’s go find her – in her bedroom, in a big, grey stone house in the English countryside. It’s the eighteen-twenties and Ada is at her window…watching the birds…

She starts to think, “What would it take for me to be able to fly with the birds, and how can I make it real?”

She piles her long curling hair on top of her head in loops and whirls. Slips into a simple blue gown, and then sets out into the garden, through the misty morning, to watch the birds more closely. The air is filled with the smell of English roses opening their petals to the sun.

She sees the ways the birds move. The size and shape of their wings, the curve of their bodies. And, little by little, her wonderful brain works out the science, the mathematical calculations, of how they fly.

There, in the garden she sketches, scribbling down idea after idea. It’s another kind of flying: using her mind and creativity to solve a problem.

Later, she’ll write and illustrate a book called, FLYOLOGY, about everything she’s learned. But today, she’s made a decision.

She will build her own wings.

In the old barn behind the big grey house, Ada experiments with materials. Searching for just the right one.

Paper was light and could be cut into any shape, but would it hold up in the sky? Real feathers, hollow on the inside and a little bit prickly at the tip, almost did the trick. Finally, she settles on slippery oiled silk and sturdy wire.

She builds many versions. Testing each one to see if it works. With the green grass of her home stretching in front of her, and the grey stone of the house behind her, she would run, with the wind whistling in her ears.

She runs…and she leaps…and…she falls.

But, there was an instant before she fell to the ground where she was weightless, suspended in the sky, half-girl and half-bird. It was glorious.

Ada knows she hasn’t failed. She just has more work to do. So, she keeps at it.

She keeps dreaming in numbers and diagrams. Envisioning machines no one else could.

Thinking differently can feel hard or maybe lonely sometimes, BUT it’s also what makes you, you. Keep listening to yourself and keep dreaming.