91av

WHO invented computer memory? Received wisdom has it that it was Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the Frenchman whose system of punched cards automated silk-weaving looms in the early 19th century.

Not so, says James Essinger. His entertaining tale of Jacquard’s enduring influence on the information age reveals the inventor to be one Monsieur Falcon, whose first name may have been Jean or Louis. In 1723, 78 years before the Jacquard loom was patented, Falcon developed the first unwieldy, punched-card loom, in which the cards representing a silk pattern were pushed by hand into the loom, one at a time.

Jacquard’s genius was to automate this process, eliminating the laborious manual element, which allowed silk patterns of almost any complexity to be “programmed”. Often 2000 cards or more loaded data into the loom to realise an ambitious design. Later, the story of Charles Babbage’s profound realisation that the very same mechanism could be used in computing machinery is well told, as is the adoption of punched cards by Herman Hollerith, the power behind what was to become IBM.

I expected to learn a great deal more about Jacquard, given the book’s title, but Essinger’s yarn disappoints in the lack of hard facts about the man himself. Although the author frequently refers to the dearth of reliable biographical information early on, no doubt partly as a result of the chaos in revolutionary and post-revolutionary France, it would have been good to know how Jacquard hit upon his ideas. They appear as if by magic.

Jacquard’s Web is nevertheless a welcome book. Computer geeks think they are inheriting the Earth: it’s time they learned about computing’s creative roots in the textile trade. Anyone who enjoyed Tom Standage’s book on automata, The Mechanical Turk, will probably enjoy Jacquard’s Web. The more so since automata maker Jacques de Vaucanson was also a grand fromage in the loom automation field.