The Technology History That Starts With a Poet

The Innovators opens with Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron who wrote what is considered the first algorithm more than a century before computers existed. Walter Isaacson uses her as a frame for the book's central argument: that the great technological achievements of the digital age were collaborative, not solo, and that the myth of the lone genius inventor misrepresents what actually happened. The Ada chapter alone is worth the price of the book.