The Necronists: A Paranormal Steampunk Thriller (The Guild Chronicles Book 2) by J.M. Bannon

Author:J.M. Bannon [Bannon, J.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Claymore, Ulfberht & Xiphos LLC
Published: 2018-02-21T22:00:00+00:00

15

Thursday the 21st of March

8:12 a.m. Nasson Textile Mill Bethnal Green

The sound of the register cylinders was deafening. Hundreds of thousands of registers adjusting position every cycle, mixed with the rumble of the belts, flywheels, and engine powering the Number Loom.

Standing in front of the printer, Augustus De Morgan reviewed the end product printing on the long roll of paper. With each cycle of the machine, the mechanism rapped out numbers and words, similar to the typesetting of a wire type receiver, but that is where the similarity ended. The printer was dwarfed by the twenty-foot-tall calculating mill. The enormous cylindrical columns of cogs and gears interconnected to the fifteen-barrel controllers that transferred numbers from the store into the mill where calculations were performed according to De Morgan’s punch card program. Augustus observed the elderly Charles Babbage sitting on a chair resting with a smile observing his machine. Augustus walked over to him letting the unspooled print-out fall to the collection basket. "Mr. Babbage you look to be under a charm," said De Morgan

“I am for either I’m in a dream or the luckiest man on earth to get his dream to be made real," said Babbage.

"You are a genius sir and your work now realized will change the world.”

“You flatter me. I’m just particular and needed a solution that would eliminate human error. You see those cards you feed into the machine to program the movements. That is from the textile industry they have used punch cards for years to create patterns in lace. I just use them instead to set the mechanical pins that translate to the registers," said the old man in the chair.

The sole purpose of the gigantic Number Loom was to perform the calculations for Professor De Morgan's Systematic Analysis of Equine Handicapping. The program was read from the operations cards, a string of 1,200 cream colored paper cards with holes punched into their surfaces. 100 metal pins pressed against the cards, those that did not engage, set tumblers that ratcheted what operation barrels would be used on the cycle. Another bunch of cards was fed into the machine to introduce the variables for the calculation cycle. The Loom would move through the string of cards all tied together in a loop by yarn; this was how the Number Loom digested De Morgan’s complex math problem.

The bulk of the machine was twenty-foot tall registers in banks that stretched for two hundred feet. This part of the machine was called the store, as it held the numbers the Loom calculated to be either printed out or used in later calculations. The massive machine was driven by belts that connected to a steam engine.

"I just don't understand why the machine is in the basement of a textile mill?" asked Babbage.

"Because you designed a machine that needed a huge boiler to power it," said Jimmy Lin. No one had heard him walk up with the clamor of the Number Loom.

The Loom was in the basement of the Nasson Textile Mill Located in Bethnal Green.

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