Daughter of the poet Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace was a child prodigy. Brilliant at maths, she read numbers like most people read words. In 1834 she came to the attention of Charles Babbage, a scientist and techno-whizz who had just built an amazing new 'thinking machine'. Babbage took to Ada and asked her to work with him. Thus began a remarkable collaboration, which eventually bore fruit in the most important invention of the modern world - the computer.