Jacquards' Web (21 page)

Ada’s life after her collaboration with Babbage was mainly a tragic waste of talent. She only lived for nine more years. Within a few months of the collaboration with her friend she developed physical and mental health problems and started to take laudanum—a powerful combination of opium and brandy—whenever she felt unwell. By
1845
she was suffering much of the time from nervous exhaustion, general debilitation, and what were probably the first signs of the cancer that was to kill her.

Gradually her health deteriorated. Finally, much too late to be of any possible use, a diagnosis was made of uterine cancer.

She died on
27
November
1852
, after suffering frightful pain that was only partly relieved by the laudanum and by a new drug, chloroform. Lady Byron and Ada’s husband William were at her bedside, but Lady Byron had quarrelled with Babbage, and he was not allowed to visit the house. Ada and Babbage remained good friends during her final illness. Lady Byron was bitterly 145

Jacquard’s Web

jealous of the extent to which Ada had confided in Babbage about family and personal matters, when she could manage to get in touch with him.

A week after she died, Ada was laid to rest next to her father in the small church in the village of Hucknall Torkard, Nottinghamshire, close to Lord Byron’s ancestral home of Newstead Abbey. The father and daughter—whose lives were almost exactly the same length—now lie side by side in a tomb that has been permanently sealed since
1929
.

And Babbage? He continued to labour on his dream of cogwheel computers to the very end. He was, indeed, still working on his designs for the Analytical Engine when, after a short illness, he died on
18
October
1871
, aged nearly eighty. In his last years he was plagued by headaches and the noise of urban life. He socialized little, spending much time alone in his London home, living among the ghosts of his dreams.

A precious but tragic insight into Babbage’s forlorn later life was provided at a mathematical conference in July
1914
by the statesman and scientific adviser Lord Moulton. Recalling a visit he had made to Babbage many years earlier, apparently in the late
1860
s, Moulton painted a dismal picture of the price the gods had extracted from Babbage for having bestowed on him a vision of a computer, without granting him the tools—technological, financial, and diplomatic—to make his dreams come true.

One of the sad memories of my life is a visit to the celebrated mathematician and inventor, Mr Babbage. He was far advanced in age, but his mind was still as vigorous as ever. He took me through his work-rooms. In the first room I saw the parts of the original Calculating Machine [i.e. the Difference Engine], which had been shown in an incomplete state many years before. I asked him about its present form.

‘I have not finished it because in working at it I came on the idea of my Analytical Machine, which would do all that it was capable of doing and much more. Indeed, the idea was so 146

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.

148

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10
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A crisis with the American

Census

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ❚ 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ❚ 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 ❚ 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

4 4 ❚ 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 ❚ 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5

6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 ❚ 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6

7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 ❚ 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7

8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 ❚ 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8

9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 ❚ 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9

0 0 0 0 0 0 ❚ ❚ 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Hollerith’s pioneering punched card tabulating machines made it possible for the first time for government and business to process large amounts of information in an efficient, economic and timely way—to act on the basis of current facts, as one of his associates put it, before they became ancient history.

Geoffrey D. Austrian,

Herman Hollerith, Forgotten Giant of Information Processing
,
1982

Herman Hollerith was a strange man.

He was instrumental in taking the story of Jacquard’s Web into the twentieth century, but he appears to have had no sense of technological destiny. His work in pioneering the development of effective accounting machines based around the Jacquard loom makes him one of the founding fathers of the high-technology era, yet he would have been deeply embarrassed to have been described as such. He invented a completely new type of 149

Jacquard’s Web

machine—a device he called a ‘tabulator’—that can reasonably be described as the first successfully completed loom to weave information rather than fabric. This made the world his oyster, yet Hollerith was so blind to the commercial importance of his invention that he almost let his rivals reap these commercial benefits rather than himself.

He travelled the world to meet with foreign governments to whom he tried to sell his machines as an accounting tool for their national census, yet he detested travel and could not wait to get back home to be with his family. His inventive talents finally won him a large fortune, but he had no particular love of money and few pleasures except his family, food, and work. He was unquestionably a genius, but he had none of the technological vision of Charles Babbage or Ada Lovelace. If there is anybody who would have been astonished to hear that Hollerith’s inventions led directly to the foundation of the computer giant IBM and to a global revolution in information technology, it would have been Hollerith himself.

A strange man, indeed. Yet a remarkably inventive pioneer whose story is an essential part of the tale of the Jacquard loom.

On Tuesday
24
October
1871
Charles Babbage was laid to rest in London’s vast Kensal Green cemetery. Hardly anyone attended his funeral. As far as the world of science was concerned, Babbage had been history for many years before his death. The excited crowds that had once attended his wonderful soirées had long since melted away. The only carriage that followed the hearse contained the Duchess of Somerset, an elderly lady who had become a good friend of Babbage in his old age.

As the gravediggers tossed the cold gravel and earth over Babbage’s coffin, consigning one of the greatest scientists of all time to darkness, a funeral guest with a visionary knowledge of his work might have been forgiven for thinking that it was not only Babbage who was being buried. The very notion of a special 150

A crisis with the American Census

type of Jacquard loom that could weave information rather than silk was, one might have thought, also being sent into oblivion.

After all, Jacquard, Ada Lovelace, and now Babbage himself were all dead, and the harsh, stern, materialistic world of
1871
was completely indifferent to Babbage’s plans for his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine.

True, the Jacquard loom was by now being widely used around the world, but it was merely regarded as a superb machine for weaving images into silk, and nothing more than this. Anyone who had declared that the loom had laid the ground for a technological revolution which within a century would transform the world for ever, would have been laughed out of court. Assuming, of course, that anybody had bothered to listen to them.

But great ideas may acquire a life of their own as they travel on through the years, getting into all sorts of new company, and even acquiring new appearances no one could possibly have fore-seen. To borrow a point made by George Orwell, the idea might even seem to change beyond all recognition, yet at heart, like any living thing, it will remain the same. Indeed, great inventors are rather like blacksmiths forging shoes to be worn by the winged horse Pegasus. The inventors start by setting out to solve a practical problem, then their solution soars off into uncharted skies whose scope they could not have imagined when they embarked on their work.

What is true of great inventors generally is especially true of Joseph-Marie Jacquard. The modest, industrious Frenchman never guessed that the automatic punched-card loom he had devised to weave mesmerisingly complex and stunningly beautiful patterns into silk would one day evolve into a tool whose breadth of possible applications was close to unlimited. Jacquard had invented a method to automate a complex process. But controlling the warp threads that enabled works of art to be woven into silk fabric barely even began to tap the potential of punched-card technology.

Tapping that potential required not a theory but a practical 151

Jacquard’s Web

Herman Hollerith as a young man.

application which worked. And in fact in
1871
the man fated to pick up the baton of Jacquard’s idea and continue the race was already an eleven-year-old boy, his passion for machinery and technology thoroughly evident. Thanks to Herman Hollerith, the metamorphosis of the Jacquard loom into the most powerful tool ever created lay just around the corner.

Herman Hollerith was born on
29
February
1860
in the town of Buffalo, New York State. He was the son of German parents who had come to America in
1848
to find a more prosperous and stable life at a time when the states that formed a not yet united Germany were going through continuous political turmoil. His father, Johann Georg Hollerith, was killed in an accident when Herman was nine and Herman’s brother, George, six years older.