Overview

Jacquard's Web is the fascinating story of how Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented a loom that was to spark the beginning of today s information age. The astonishing new loom, invented in 1804, enabled the master weavers of Lyons to create their beautiful silk fabrics 25 times faster than had ever been possible before. This device used revolutionary punched cards to store instructions for weaving the required pattern or design. The loom proved an outstanding success, and these cards are now rightly viewed as the world s first computer programs. In this previously untold story, James Essinger brings to light a series of historical links that reveal the extraordinary relationship between the nineteenth-century world of weaving and today s computer age. Along the way, he introduces a cast of colourful, passionate and often eccentric characters. These include two of the most intriguing people in the history of science and technology: Charles Babbage, the great Victorian scientist and thinker, and the beautiful and witty Countess of Lovelace, Lord Byron s daughter, who played a crucial role in developing Babbage s work. The book also tells the stories of the other pioneers who helped transform the technology of the punched-card loom into the modern computer. People such as Herman Hollerith, the brilliant German-American inventor; Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM; and Howard Aiken, who built one of the world s very first computers. James Essinger concludes by bringing the story completely up-to-date with the latest developments in the World Wide Web and the fascinating phenomenon of artificial intelligence.

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9780192805775

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Reviews

An entertaining and illuminating exercise in making connections between apparently disparate scientific endeavours. TLS

A British science writer traces the history of the punched card, from the Jacquard loom, which programmed the weaving of elaborate silk brocades, to the modern computer. After a brief history of silk, Essinger introduces Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834), the son of a master-weaver. In Napoleonic France, after the revolution, Jacquard puttered aimlessly until about 1800, when he patented an improved loom. In its final form, the Jacquard loom wove the complex patterns that made it famously 24 times faster than earlier versions, but with half the manpower. Honored by Napoleon, Jacquard lived out his life in prosperity; but the story of his cards had just begun. In England, Charles Babbage (1792-1871) conceived a machine to calculate the mathematical tables that Victorian science and industry were increasingly coming to rely on. In 1834 he decided to use Jacquard's cards to control his machine. With the help of Lord Byron's daughter Ada, Countess Lovelace (1816-52), he worked on the design for several years, but the lack of sufficiently precise and uniform mechanical parts prevented him from completing his Analytical Engine. The next step in the career of Jacquard's cards came when the American engineer Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) built a machine to tabulate the data from the 1890 US Census. In 1911, Hollerith's tabulating machine company merged with two others to form IBM. Those IBM cards (as they were now known) programmed the pioneering computer designed by Howard Aiken and built by IBM in 1944, and the electronic machines-ENIAC, UNIVAC, and their successors-that made computing practical. The IBM card dominated computing until the 1980s, when electronic devices took over its function, and played a role in history as late as the election of 2000. Essinger's sketches of the various inventors and scientists are lively, and he effectively places their contributions in historical context. Fascinating scientific history based on the humblest of artifacts. (Kirkus Reviews)

When was the first computer invented? Some would point to Turin's code-breaker used at Bletchley Park during the Second World War; others might mention Charles Babbage's mighty Difference Engine which, but for the lack of funds, might have resulted in a steam-driven computer age 150 years ago.However, the real answer lies even further back in history, when Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a modest French weaver, in 1804 hit upon the idea of a silk loom that could be programmed to weave complex patterns using punched cards. These punchcards inspired Babbage and are even today recognisable as the precursors to the cards that were used in computers as recently as the 1980s. James Essinger, a writer with a particular interest in the history of ideas,has an impressive array of facts at his fingertips and writes with a lively enthusiasm about his subject, vividly bringing to life Babbage, the difficult scientist, and Lady Byron, his charismatic interpreter , and rounding off his account with the story of how successivemathematicians working for the company that would become IBM used Jacquard's and Babbage's inventions to inform their work on the modern computer. (Kirkus UK)

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James Essinger is a freelance writer living in the United Kingdom.

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