Book Review: Jacquard's Web by James Essinger

Essinger, James. Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 302 pp.

In 1804 in Lyons, France, Joseph Marie Jacquard invented the first computer. Alright, it wasn't really a computer like we think of them—it was silk-weaving loom that, once fed a set of punched cards in sequence, would output a piece of perfectly woven silk with a programmed pattern. Most machines of the day were simply meant to make the user perform a task more easily, but they still required users nonetheless. Jacquard’s loom made it possible to simultaneously cut down on the number of loom operators and speed up production of French silk at a time when the aristocracy was clamoring for the fabric. Like most great inventions, this ideas made Jacquard a very rich man and he retired without any further improvements on his loom.

Many years later, the eccentric gentleman scientist Charles Babbage, upon looking at a portrait of Jacquard made on his programmable loom, hit upon the idea that a machine could be built to do mathematical calculations using the same punch-card principle. His aptly named “Analytical Engine” would accept a stack of punched cards, understand the problem being asked, and print for the operator the answer, all automatically. His previous attempts at a calculating machine (his “Difference Engine”) were put aside and spent the vast majority of his life trying to piece together the money and the metal to build such a machine.

His work got the attention of the socialite Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate daughter of the poet Lord Byron and enthusiast of all things mathematical and scientific. In her correspondence with Babbage, she was privy to the work on the Analytical Engine and even wrote an algorithm for it (if it ever got working) to compute Bernoulli numbers. Alas, both Lovelace and Babbage both died before the machine could be built.

Cue Dr. Hollerith. The 1880 U.S. Federal Census had taken eight years to completely tabulate and publish. The government realized that the 1890 Census would take even longer. This meant that the government would theoretically be still counting one census while the next was taking place. So, they enlisted the help of Herman Hollerith, an engineering guru fromBuffalo,New York. With his electrical engineering acumen, he was able to build a pair of machines that would read a punched card containing a person’s census data and sort them into various statistical groups, all the while maintaining a record of the entire census, what Hollerith called a tabulating machine. While others tried to imitate his design, his were the best, using special cards and allowing the census to be completed in one year.

Realizing he had just optimized himself out of a job, he reluctantly decided to merge his company with two others into what eventually became International Business Machines Incorporated, or IBM. This new company was headed up by the industrious Thomas Watson, a legendary salesman who fiercely supported and rewarded company loyalty. His leadership took IBM from a $9 million company to a $900 million one.

Meanwhile, electrician Howard Aiken was dreaming up a machine that would do far more than count people. His vision was for a machine that could receive a set of instructions and data and carry out massively complex calculations all on its own. He put together a business proposal for the machine, got funded by Watson’s IBM, and successfully built the Harvard Mark I, the first modern day computer. It took a set of punched card instructions and returned a result. From there, the world got faster and smarter—the ENIAC, the UNIVAC, and so on until the creation of the personal computer and the world as we know it today.

James Essinger’s tale of the history of automated and computing devices is a fun one to read. There are times when he belabors the point of relating the Jacquard loom to calculating devices, and his digression on the relationship between Babbage and Lovelace can get a little tiring, but overall Essinger successfully weaves a fine tale (sorry for the pun). It is a quick read, perhaps 5-8 hours. Any lover of technology history should not miss this book.