Jacquard's Web: How A Hand-Loom Led To The Birth Of The Information Age

Rating:
Summary: a Victorian computer revolution......
Review:
No one could read the first chapter of this book and not finish it. In fact, I've just spent the past two days devouring it from start to finish. It's an entertaining fact-filled romp through the entire history of something that dominates our lives, and that we always think of as entirely modern... and yet the history this book traces goes back nearly 5,000 years.

What I liked best about it was the teasingly thought-provoking idea the author raises: that our computer age could have started over 150 years ago in Victorian England...

According to Jacquard's Web, the Victorian scientist Charles Babbage spent a lifetime building and refining metal calculating cogwheel machines or `engines' as Babbage called them. The working portions of the Engines he built worked perfectly. As Babbage's friend and colleague Ada Lovelace once said, it was the first time in history that `wheelwork' had been taught `to think'. But funding ran out and Babbage died never seeing his calculating engines come to fruition.

What I found so incredibly thought-provoking in this book was that in London in 1991 a perfectly working Difference Engine was built from Charles Babbage's plans and drawings. I have seen the Difference Engine in action myself (as the white-gloved engineer cranks the handle, the stacked columns of cogwheels spiral and coalesce beautifully as they perform their mathematical calculations) but I hadn't realised the significance at the time.
According to the author, James Essinger, if Babbage had found the funding to complete his Engines, computers could have come into widespread use in the nineteenth century. Now if that isn't a thought-provoking idea I don't know what is!





Rating:
Summary: computers made interesting
Review: As the least technologically-minded person I know I bought this book because I wanted to find out what computers really are and how they've come to dominate our lives today. The book didn't disappoint. It performs the unlikely paradox of making computing interesting - fascinating in fact.

This is because Jacquard's Web is such a human story. The author breathes life into some incredibly interesting characters - an ancient Chinese princess, two cheeky monks from Constantinople who perform the first recorded instance of industrial espionage when they sneak silk-worm eggs out of ancient China in their walking sticks, the greedy kings and queens of Europe and their unquenchable desire for luxurious fabrics, Napoleon, the fascinatingly eccentric Victorian computer pioneer Charles Babbage and his friend Ada Lovelace - daughter of the notoriously sexually rapacious poet Lord Byron, and of course dedicated, ingenious Jacquard himself.

I was surprisingly fascinated by the more modern portion of the story: Essinger's account of the trials and tribulations of Herman Hollerith and 1890 US Census when the US government struggled to find new technology to cope with the unprecedented mass of data that was pouring in. (Jacquard's punched card technology did the trick) and the account of the dawn of IBM.

This is a friendly, frequently very funny tale, and - for me - an enjoyable and truly memorable initiation into our high tech world of IT and the computer. I thoroughly recommend it.