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Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (review)

One ought to be suspicious of books that suggest that history is a linear flow of events, each one logically following the one before it, until we arrive at the “information age” we are now enjoying. James Essinger’s book suggests such a sequence that began with the invention of the automatic silk loom around 1800. Even though I do not accept that thesis, his stories of the individual steps along the way are well told and make this book worth reading. Essinger argues that the French silk weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard, working in the city of Lyon, developed a method of automatically lifting selected warp threads to produce a pattern in the woven cloth. The method by which his loom accomplished this was through a sequence of punched cards, which directed the lifting of threads depending on whether a hole was encountered at each step. While many machines before Jacquard’s loom were capable of executing a sequence of actions, his was the first to separate its control mechanism from the body of the machine proper; in other words, one could use the same loom, with a different set of punched cards, to weave a completely different pattern of cloth. The loom’s intrinsic design was neutral and did not force its user towards or away from a specific pattern. This is the basic principle of the modern digital computer, whose software directs it to do things that its designers only partly envision. Jacquard’s invention opened up the loom to an infinite variety of patterned cloth. Today’s computers call up a variety of other classic machines: a typewriter (Word), a calculator (Excel), a telegraph (e-mail), a darkroom (Photoshop), and so on—the list is extensive and not predictable, which is precisely Essinger’s point. His linear sequence runs through other names that may be more familiar than Jacquard’s: Charles Babbage, who proposed using punched cards to direct his Analytical Engine; Ada Augusta Byron, who understood the conceptual separation of hardware and software more than Babbage himself did; Herman Hollerith, who used punched cards to tabulate the 1890 U.S. Census and founded a company that later became IBM; and Howard Aiken, who in the 1940s enlisted IBM’s help to construct a calculator that was sequenced by holes punched in paper tape. Essinger’s book ends with the symbol of today’s information age, the appropriately named Worldwide Web, which is the modern version of Jacquard cloth, even if the Web’s inventor did not have Jacquard in mind when he named his creation. The book’s strongest chapters are its earliest, which focus on Jacquard, B O O K R E V I E W S