Jacquards' Web by James Essinger

Author:James Essinger [Essinger, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The lady who loved the Jacquard loom

A portrait of Charles Babbage taken in London in 1860 when he was 68. This is probably the last portrait of him taken in his lifetime.

much simpler that it would have taken more work to complete the Calculating Machine than to design and construct the other in its entirety, so I turned my attention to the Analytical Machine.’

After a few minutes’ talk we went into the next work-room, where he showed and explained to me the working of the elements of the Analytical Machine. I asked if I could see it.

‘I have never completed it,’ he said, ‘because I hit upon an idea of doing the same thing by a different and far more effective method, and this rendered it useless to proceed on the old lines.’ Then we went into the third room. There lay scattered bits of mechanism but I saw no trace of any working machine.

Very cautiously I approached the subject, and received the dreaded answer, ‘It is not constructed yet, but I am working 147

Jacquard’s Web

at it, and it will take less time to construct it altogether than it would have taken to complete the Analytical Machine from the stage in which I left it.’

I took leave of the old man with a heavy heart. When he died a few years later, not only had he constructed no machine, but the verdict of a jury of kind and sympathetic scientific men who were deputed to pronounce upon what he had left behind him, either in papers or mechanism, was that everything was too incomplete to be capable of being put to any useful purpose.

But the ‘jury’—whoever they might have been—were wrong.

As things turned out, Babbage had left behind enough plans and drawings for a complete, working version of one of his machines to be constructed by an epoch that was better equipped to understand the audacious brilliance of his vision. All he had really needed was access to an effective and efficient precision engineering industry: not because the technology of his own time was not up to the job of producing components to the requisite toler-ances—it was—but because Babbage required a reliable source of thousands of identical cogwheels to be supplied relatively promptly, and at a reasonable cost.

As for Ada Lovelace’s vision of a machine that could process and memorize calculations, algebraic patterns, and even all types of symbolic relationships as adeptly as the Jacquard loom could weave silk, that was a dream just waiting to come true.

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A crisis with the American

Census

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