Desperate for the company of other children and frustrated at studying under an inept governess, young Ada Byron spends her summer holiday in Kent, dreaming of becoming a great inventor, with a steam-powered flying-horse her first creation. When Ada shares her plans with Tom, the local blacksmith’s apprentice, her domineering mother, Lady Byron, fears that Ada has inherited what Lady Byron sees as her late husband’s rebellious and excessively imaginative personality. Determined to keep scandal in the past, Lady Byron whisks her daughter back to London in search of more suitable connections.

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At the age of seventeen, Ada meets eccentric mathematician Charles Babbage, who is struggling to build a calculating machine out of cogwheels, which he calls The Difference Engine.

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Ada and Babbage start to explore the applications of this ingenious invention, while Ada makes her first true friend in Babbage’s young daughter Georgie. Ada confides in Georgie her continued love for Tom, and her disappointment that Tom has never answered any of her letters. Hurt and rejected, Ada meekly goes along with her mother’s matchmaking and marries Lord William Lovelace, while in a startling twist of fate, Tom appears in London to profess his love too late to prevent the marriage.

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With Tom’s reappearance, Ada, horrified to realise that Lady Byron deliberately concealed Tom’s letters from her, is forced to tread the narrow line between friendship and love while dealing with unexpected tragedy.

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Ada consoles herself with her friendship with Tom, and learns to balance her personal life with motherhood and her ardent interest in Babbage’s second, and most ambitious machine, The Analytical Engine. This remarkable device is nothing less than a sophisticated digital computer built from cogwheels - the world’s first computer. Ada’s perception of the Analytical Engine far exceeds even Babbage’s, and she invents a special formula, an algorithm, that will open up the potential of the Analytical Engine for the future.

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Ada blends mathematics with art in her own, personal branch of what she calls ‘poetical science’, and despite confronting the fact that at the age of thirty-six she is suffering from a fatal illness, she soars into the heart of posterity by visualising exactly how computers could transform the world.

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Ada dies, meeting her father Lord Byron, and her beloved friend Georgie, in the afterlife.

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As the musical ends in a blaze of emotion, drama and redemption, we realise that all Ada’s predictions about the potential of computers have, today, come true