Jacquards' Web (17 page)
Authors: James Essinger
This spirit of optimism governed thought and action. Above all, the age believed in the power of machinery to achieve almost anything. As Thomas Carlyle—who invented the expression
‘captains of industry’ and who once remarked that man was above all ‘a tool-making animal’—wrote in his
1882
retrospective essay
Signs of the Times
:
Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends.
Babbage’s work ultimately furnished a spectacularly original way whereby precise mechanical means might be adapted to the end of making machines that generated an infinitely useful commodity: accurate, reliable, rapid calculations. As Babbage’s friend 115
Jacquard’s Web
and would-be biographer Henry Wilmot Buxton wrote in the
1870
s of Babbage’s work:
The marvellous pulp and fibre of a brain had been substituted by brass and iron; he had taught wheelwork to think.
But beautifully expressed as this statement is, it is in truth more a statement of the success to which Babbage aspired than a reflection of what he actually managed to achieve when he was alive.
He understood that the purpose of machines is to make up for the inherent limitations of human abilities. In his case, what he was most concerned about, as we have seen, was the alarming tendency for people to make mistakes when they undertook calculations due to the sheer mental drudgery these calculations required.
On the face of it Babbage should have had everything going for him. He was rich, he had a tremendous breadth of contacts and devoted admirers who included some of the most eminent people in the land. He had the ear of the Government, at least initially. Compare his position to that of Jacquard at the outset of
his
career, and it seems inconceivable that Jacquard would succeed and Babbage would not. Yet certain crucial factors, combined with the daunting technical challenges (which, in fairness to Babbage, were even greater than those faced by the Frenchman), resulted in Babbage’s failure.
In particular, Babbage was severely handicapped by his stubbornness when it came to the standards of precision he wanted to attain. Modern research has demonstrated that the levels of precision Babbage aimed for were higher than he actually needed.
With hindsight, this slowed him down significantly.
He was also hampered by his political and diplomatic naïveté.
This, as we know, tended to lead to his inept handling of influential people who might have helped him.
Another serious problem was his unfortunate reluctance to work on equal terms with his brilliant engineer Clement. Babbage always treated him as a mere servant, albeit an important one.
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A question of faith and funding
Babbage was very far from being a snob—he was perfectly at ease socially with tradesmen and working people—but he had been born into the ruling-class of England and never quite forgot this.
His attitude alienated Clement, who was not an easy person to get on with at the best of times. Finally, the two men’s working relationship broke down completely, and Clement left Babbage’s service.
The result of all this was that Jacquard enjoyed fame, glory, and fulfilment, while Babbage went to his grave a bitterly disappointed and disillusioned man.
If Babbage had successfully completed a working example of this first type of cogwheel computer, the Difference Engine, the resources and the money would surely have been made available for him to have at least a better-than-evens chance of completing the much more complex and ambitious Analytical Engine. Babbage himself never doubted that technology could achieve almost anything. If he had had a little more success in his endeavours and proved his machines financially viable, can we really doubt that the energetic, visionary, and money-obsessed age in which he lived would have made his dreams come true?
There would be little more to tell about Babbage’s role in
Jacquard’s Web
were it not for Ada Byron, Lord Byron’s daughter.
We have already briefly met her when looking at how Babbage explained the origins of his plans for the Analytical Engine to Ada, her mother Lady Byron, and their friend Mary Somerville.
Ada was one of the few people, apart from Babbage himself, who understood the full importance of Babbage’s work in general and his invention of the Analytical Engine in particular. Aristocrat, amateur mathematician, housewife, occasional laudanum addict, and self-proclaimed genius, Ada was an ally of the most enthusiastic and supportive kind. And, most importantly for us, she was particularly fascinated by the relationship between the Analytical Engine and the Jacquard loom.
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Is thy face like thy mother’s, my fair child!
Ada! sole daughter of my house and heart?
When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled,
And then we parted,—not as now we part,
But with a hope.—
Awaking with a start,
The waters heave around me; and on high
The winds lift up their voices: I depart,
Whither I know not; but the hour’s gone by
When Albion’s lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.
Lord Byron.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
,
Canto
3
,
1816
If Ada Byron could somehow emerge from the tomb in the Nottinghamshire church in the English Midlands where she has lain since
1852
and get to know our world, what would she think of it?
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120
The lady who loved the Jacquard loom
She always adored technology. She would certainly be fascinated to see the extensive and indeed extraordinary technological advances that have taken place between her day and our own.
Throughout her girlhood she dreamed of flying in a flying machine and even made tentative plans to build a steam-powered one. It would be a delight to take her on a flight in an airplane and let her experience her dream come true.
Most of all, though, in view of her fascination with Charles Babbage’s work that lasted all her adult life, she would love to see how many computers there are in our world, how powerful they are, how
inexpensive
they are, and how small and compact.
True, she might be disappointed to find how little they resemble Babbage’s cogwheel machines in external appearance, but once Ada became acquainted with the range of functions and features they offer, she would surely be happy to overlook that. As, one feels, would Charles Babbage himself. After all, he only used cogwheels because they were the sole technology available in his own day that he could imagine to offer any possibility of allowing the creation of calculating machines. He certainly did not have any inherent, stubborn attachment to cogwheel technology.
Ada has become a famous figure in the history of computing due to her association with Babbage, who is with some justification regarded today as the father of computing. Ada was famous during her lifetime, too, but for a different reason.
Her celebrity in the nineteenth century stemmed from her father being the poet Lord Byron. For much of the century he was the most popular poet in Europe, as renowned for his omniv-orous love life as he was for his passionate, verbally dazzling poems. He fathered many children in his sexual peregrinations around Britain and Continental Europe. Unlike his other children, however, Ada was born in wedlock, for Byron temporarily succumbed to marriage with Ada’s mother.
The daughter of a great romantic poet, a Victorian housewife and mother, Ada was an unlikely collaborator with Charles (
left
) Portrait of Ada Lovelace.
Jacquard’s Web
Babbage in his work on the Analytical Engine. Yet in fact, she turned out to be his most important ally. Today, her reputation in connection with the prehistory of the computer is growing in direct proportion to the ever-increasing importance of computers in our world. Here is Ada in action:
In studying the action of the Analytical Engine, we find that the peculiar and independent nature of the considerations which belong to
operations
, as distinguished from
the objects
operated upon
and from the
results
of the operations performed upon these objects, is very strikingly defined and separated.
The above passage is typical of the calibre of the work attributed to Ada. This passage could almost be an extract from a modern computer manual,
but written by a Victorian
. It is included in a Note that Ada appended to a translation she published in
1843
of a scientific paper, constituting a detailed discussion of the Analytical Engine, which had been published in French the year before. The paper Ada translated was written by the Italian scientist Luigi Federico Menabrea. He had finally come up with the goods.
Menabrea’s paper is a detailed account of the concept and purpose of the Analytical Engine. The paper was published in the October
1842
issue of
Bibliothèque Universell
e, one of Continental Europe’s foremost scientific journals.
The passage just quoted provides a clear anticipation of the fundamental difference between computer
software
(that is, the set of instructions according to which a computer operates) and
data
(that is, the actual numbers on which the computer’s actions are performed, and the results derived from these numbers). Ada is basically expressing the principle using nineteenth-century language.
And this, of course, is exactly the same idea Jacquard embodied in his loom. It is also the concept Babbage borrowed from Jacquard and incorporated into the Analytical Engine. Ada was particularly sensitive to the significance of the Jacquard loom in Babbage’s plans. The best way to understand her contribution to 122
The lady who loved the Jacquard loom
Babbage’s work is to see it in terms of the relationship between Babbage’s work and Jacquard’s. Ada loved the Jacquard loom, and added it to her many scientific fascinations.
Menabrea’s paper is heavily based on information Babbage supplied to him. We can be certain of this, because there are extensive similarities between much of Menabrea’s material and such writing as Babbage himself did on the Analytical Engine.
Menabrea, for example, takes considerable pains to point out that the invention of the Analytical Engine was
not
the cause of the abandonment of the work on the Difference Engine. Babbage always makes the same point. Menabrea emphasizes that work on the Difference Engine had in fact already been set aside before Babbage started to develop the concept of the Analytical Engine.
It is known that misconceptions about this matter greatly aggrieved Babbage, who took every step to encourage Menabrea to publicize what really happened. (As we have seen, Babbage did in fact subsequently again take up work on the Difference Engine in the
1850
s, but Menabrea could not of course have known he would do that.)
Had Ada
only
translated Menabrea’s paper her achievement would have merely been a linguistic one. Furthermore, one could reasonably have said that she was to a large extent translating a paper whose intellectual content was substantially Babbage’s own. But in fact Ada’s translation was merely the starting-point for her work, for her published translation is accompanied by seven additional Notes (she consistently capital-izes the word). These, denoted by the letters A to G, extend to more than
20 000
words: that is, about twice as long as the actual translation. They offer a penetrating insight into the Analytical Engine, with its revolutionary design and objectives and with its intimate conceptual connection with the Jacquard loom. As one reads the Notes, the information technology revolution seems just around the corner, instead of more than a century in the future.
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Jacquard’s Web