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Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (review)

2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.2006.0061

1097-3729

Paul E. Ceruzzi,

Art, Technology, and Culture

Reviewed by: Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age Paul Ceruzzi (bio) Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age. By James Essinger. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xi+302. $26. One ought to be suspicious of books that suggest that history is a linear flow of events, each one logically following the one before it, until we arrive at the "information age" we are now enjoying. James Essinger's book suggests such a sequence that began with the invention of the automatic silk loom around 1800. Even though I do not accept that thesis, his stories of the individual steps along the way are well told and make this book worth reading. Essinger argues that the French silk weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard, working in the city of Lyon, developed a method of automatically lifting selected warp threads to produce a pattern in the woven cloth. The method by which his loom accomplished this was through a sequence of punched cards, which directed the lifting of threads depending on whether a hole was encountered at each step. While many machines before Jacquard's loom were capable of executing a sequence of actions, his was the first to separate its control mechanism from the body of the machine proper; in other words, one could use the same loom, with a different set of punched cards, to weave a completely different pattern of cloth. The loom's intrinsic design was neutral and did not force its user towards or away from a specific pattern. This is the basic principle of the modern digital computer, whose software directs it to do things that its designers only partly envision. Jacquard's invention opened up the loom to an infinite variety of patterned cloth. Today's computers call up a variety of other classic machines: a typewriter (Word), a calculator (Excel), a telegraph (e-mail), a darkroom (Photoshop), and so on—the list is extensive and not predictable, which is precisely Essinger's point. His linear sequence runs through other names that may be more familiar than Jacquard's: Charles Babbage, who proposed using punched cards to direct his Analytical Engine; Ada Augusta Byron, who understood the conceptual separation of hardware and software more than Babbage himself did; Herman Hollerith, who used punched cards to tabulate the 1890 U.S. Census and founded a company that later became IBM; and Howard Aiken, who in the 1940s enlisted IBM's help to construct a calculator that was sequenced by holes punched in paper tape. Essinger's book ends with the symbol of today's information age, the appropriately named Worldwide Web, which is the modern version of Jacquard cloth, even if the Web's inventor did not have Jacquard in mind when he named his creation. The book's strongest chapters are its earliest, which focus on Jacquard, [End Page 197] Babbage, and Byron. Other historians have written about this era, but tend to rush through it on their way towards the twentieth century. With a writing style that brings these personages to life, Essinger provides many details of their lives and work. Witnessing the reconstruction of the Babbage machine in action at the Science Museum in London led Essinger to ask whether he was seeing a device from the nineteenth century, or the twentieth, or the twenty-first. But as he progresses to the present day his command of facts becomes weaker, and in my view he does not add much new information. As to the linear view of history implied by the title, readers of this journal already know of its problems. Essinger's progression from Babbage to Hollerith to Aiken leaves out other applications of punched cards and tape that are equally relevant to this story, such as teletype tape, developed for telecommunications and modified by computer pioneers including Bill Gates, for storing programs, or the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park, who during World War II coded sequences of intercepted German messages and their potential decryption onto paper tape. The path to the present-day information age is a web, not a single strand. Essinger...