Lovelace was an English writer. She became the world's first computer programmer. She wrote the program for Charles Babbage's mechanical computer, "The Analytical Engine", in 1844. She wrote the first algorithm to be processed by a machine. Between 1842 and 1843 she translated an article by Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea on the engine. She added her own notes to it. These notes contain what is considered the first computer program, which was an algorithm encoded for processing by a machine. Though Babbage's engine was never built, Lovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers. She realized that computers would be able to do more than just calculating or number-crunching. Others, including Babbage himself, worked only on the possibilities of calculating.