Popular Science Review - Jacquard's Web

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Review - Jacquard's Web - James Essinger

Web really isn't the right word for this fascinating tale of the slow and occasionally painful progress from the punch-card operated Jacquard loom, through Babbage's never-completed computing engines, Hollerith's punch-card adding machines (tabulators) and finally the first, punch-card driven electro-mechanical computer courtesy of IBM. (There is a bit on more modern stuff, but that's very much a postscript.) A web suggests a complex knot of links, but this is both linear and very loosely connected. Even so, James Essinger makes an effective case for the importance of the French loom manufacturer's idea of using punched cards to control the pattern in silk weaving to bringing the concept of a computer to life.

It's tempting to call this a little book, although it's actually quite long - this is in part because the pages are small, but also because it's written in a cosy, gentle way. It's a pleasant run through the whole business, but not really a gripping yarn.

Strangely, the least interesting part is the section on Babbage and Ada, Countess Lovelace. This could be in part because that's the most written about already, but it's also because it's a bit of an anti-climax. Babbage only ever built 1/7th of his simpler Difference Engine, and never even got that far with the card-controlled Analytical Engine. I'd also got the impression somewhere that Ada had actually written programs for the non-existent machine, where her true contribution seems limited to translating a French paper on Babbage's work into English and adding a series of lengthy notes, which certainly gave some ideas about what might be required to make the engine work, but somehow don't live up to the romantic image. (It also doesn't help the Babbage so singularly turned down her offers to help!)

This is a borderline three star book - it nearly makes the four, but is just pulled down, in part because the theme itself, however important computers might be to us, doesn't seem gripping, and in part because it does sag a little in the Babbage section. However it is a very readable book and anyone interested in the history of computing, or the development of the industrial world should find it a very worthwhile read. If you are old enough to remember punched cards, it will bring a small tear of nostalgia to the eyes!

Only in hardback.

Read more about the links between silk weaving and the development of the computer in James Essinger's fascinating article The Loom that Wove the Future.

Reviewed by Martin O'Brien

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