Book Review: Jacquard's Web

Jacquard's Web: How a Hand Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age. James Essinger. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004. 302 pages, including 3 appendices, bibliography and index. ISBN 0192805770. Available from Amazon.com for $18.48.

"Great inventors are rather like blacksmiths forging shoes to be worn by the winged horse Pegasus. The inventors start out to solve a practical problem, then their solution soars off into uncharted skies whose scope they could not have imagined when they embarked on their work."

So points out author James Essinger at the beginning of Jacquard's Web. The title is a play on words...Essinger �weaves a web' using as threads the biographies of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the Frenchman who improved upon the hand loom by using punch cards to automate it, Charles Babbage, who saw the possibilities in Jacquard's punch card system for his own Differential Engine and Analytical Engine.

From there he brings us to Herman Hollerith, who desperately needed to be able to collate the information of the 1890 Census, and figured out a way to do it; to Thomas Watson of IBM, who kept his workforce working during the Great Depression and stockpiled machines that he knew would be bought someday..

And then there's Howard Aiken, who took all that had gone before and built on it himself, with the result of the Mark I computer, which was 8 feet high, 56 feet long and weighed nearly 5 tons. But since he didn't credit where credit was due - to the IBM engineers who assisted him, it spurred IBM president Thomas Watson to turn his company into the elite computer making company that it soon became.

Essinger's work is meticulously researched and well written. He covers everything - from the discovery of silk in China in around 2700 BC, to the life of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and math whiz who helped Babbage, to Arthur C. Clarke and the computer HAL.

This is a great introduction to the history of the computer, and like a spider's web it leads the reader off on tangents of history which are well worth discovering.�

Essinger, who is currently working on a novel about Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, keeps the reader interested at all times in this fascinating web of life.

The appendixes consist of �Charles Babbage's Vindication' - a proof that his Difference Engine could indeed be built and work, Ada Lovelace's letter to Babbage offering him assistance in work on the Analytical Engine, and finally a fuller explanation of Jacquard's loom and how it works.

Lovers of biographies and technical history will love this book.