Today, we see how wool-weaving led us into the
computer age. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Weaving a pattern into cloth
isn't such an easy matter. Different shuttles --
carrying the weft strands -- have to be threaded
through the warp strands in a precise order to give
the weave its pattern. In 1805 the French textile
engineer
Jacquard invented a remarkable scheme for
interweaving the strands in the right sequence
without using a human operator. He passed a chain
of cards, with holes punched in them, in front of a
mechanism that reached through the holes to pick up
threads. The Jacquard loom was a fine success, and
the idea's still used in modern textile mills.
Five years after Jaquard's invention, a young man
named Charles
Babbage enrolled in Cambridge University to study
mathematics and mechanics. His progress was
astonishing. In 1816, when he was only 25, he was
made a fellow of the Royal Society for his work on
calculating machines and methods. In 1834 he went a
step beyond calculators and conceived a machine that
would do much more. He conceived a machine that could
be told how to carry out a sequence of related
calculations. He conceived of programmable
computation. He never completely finished building
this "analytical engine," as he called it, but he set
us on the road to today's digital computer.
Now what does this have to do with weaving? Well, the
key to operating any computer lies in transmitting
sequences of on-off commands. Babbage used
Jacquard-style punched cards to do this. The presence
or absence of a hole communicated a simple on-off
command to the machine. And until only very recently,
we still used punched cards to transmit our
instructions to computers.
Good ideas turn and change and flow. So the genius of
the textile engineer Jacquard and of the 19th-century
inventor Babbage is alive today in our high-speed
digital computers -- changing and turning, but still
having a hand in revolutionizing our lives 150 years
later.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
