Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to mark the achievements of women in science and technology. I signed the pledge to post a while back – my second daughter just escaped being called Ada or Augusta – and have been thinking for the last twenty four hours as to what to write. (I am in the midst of trying to finish a chapter, so have little headroom space for much beyond a twenty-four hour period.)

In tracing my own work as an academic researcher and writer in, what for argument’s sake, I will call the history of science and technology, I went back to my bookcase to find those who had set me on this path. Here then is a post to the three female historians of science and technology whose work not only shifted the way I think about the world but also made me want to follow them down the path they had hacked through the jungle of the history of science and technology as it has long stood, as history-of-scientists-and-scientific-ideas and/or history-of-machines. (Another name could be ‘history-of-science-and-technology-without-culture’.) Last, but not least, these three women are all exceptional writers: elegant, intricate and always writing for a reader, features which are oftentimes hard to find in academe.

1. Sadie Plant.
   I bought her book Zeroes and Ones many moons ago, whilst studying for an undergraduate degree in maths and philosophy, when computers were just noticeably on the rise in the UK. Written in sections, sometimes a paragraph long, sometimes a few pages, Sadie Plant zooms in and out, back and forth, in the (his/her)story of weaving and computing, through the work of Jacquard, Lovelace and Babbage. It was the first book I ever read about Ada and switched my mind on to constructions of gender stereotypes, the relationship between the genealogy of words and the genealogy of practices and how histories can be written as aesthetically as any narrative can be; how history can be literary and experimental as any novel. I have re-read this book  at least once a year since I bought it – it is covered in post-it notes, marginalia and a huge variety of knocks and scrapes. One of my most well-loved books.
2. N. Katherine Hayles
   How We Became Posthuman was one of the starting texts for my PhD project. A scientist turned cultural historian and theorist, Hayles’ work is just breathtaking – her writing is always smart, her thinking vastly engaging.
3. Jessica Riskin
   I first came across Jessica Riskin at the start of my research project with her two brilliant articles on Eighteenth Century Automata, ‘The Defecating Duck, or The Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life’ (Critical Inquiry, v.20, no.4, 2003) and ‘Eighteenth Century Wetware’ (Representations, no. 83, 2003). I have read and re-read her work a number of times, always finding a new thought as I read them. She recently edited Genesis Redux, which is a great collection of essays on history and philosophy of artificial life.

Thanks to them all. And thanks to Ada.