Technology Looms

As Uncle Hugh used to say, “If folks ever really knew what they were doing, Adam would have shot himself.”

And so we arrive upon a new year.

Which, as I have previously noted in this space, means precisely nothing, other than that we have passed an arbitrary denotation of time devised when Italians were ambitious.

Having since learned the error of their ways and rebuilt a city in the shadow of Vesuvius.

Proving that ambition, unlike Ferraris, dies hard.

Stubborn folly, however, will survive volcanic eruptions.

So we come to the real lesson of this date’s commemoration, i.e. Jan. 8, 1889.

The day Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine patent was issued.

Most people know the IBM mythology of Hollerith’s struggle to count the 1890 census, and how, using punch cards passing over electric terminals, completing a circuit anywhere there was a hole, and that Hollerith got the idea from the Jacquard loom.

Thereby saving society from a blind damnation unblessed by mathematical technology.

Jacquard looms (still available today, incidentally, in case you want to whip up any quick and easy textiles) use a stack of cards (of a little tougher construction than Hollerith’s) to set the warp and weave on a mechanical loom.

Only Herman Hollerith was an idiot.

He didn’t know c’mere from sic ‘em about anything but counting stuff, and, like most techies, he had no sense of history.

In brief, he was a Republican.

And he didn’t know Shinola about mechanical looms.

He’d only seen some of them work, and figured they were a good idea because they . . . well, worked.

Having failed to examine the contextual implications of the word “work.”

First, the Jacquard loom was not invented by a guy named Jacquard.

It was invented in 1801 by a guy named Charles. Joseph Marie Charles.

He was born in 1752 reared in Lyon, where there are apparently more people named Charles than there are smug winos, and, being French, the local populace is confused by any incidence of multiple things sharing the same name.

Since Joseph Marie’s family was from Lyon’s Couzon-au-Mont d’Or suburb near the Saône River, and his grandfather’s name was Barthélemy, that entire branch of the Charles family was nicknamed  “Jacquard.”

Makes perfect sense if you’re French or drink wine in quantity for about 10 centuries.

Second, Joseph Marie Charles Jacquard’s loom didn’t work all that well until he stole some ideas from Basile Bouchon , Jean Falcon  and Jacques de Vaucanson in a business arrangement similar to Bill Gates v. Steve Jobs.

Third, note the dates. What else was going on in the world while Charles Jacquard was fiddling with his loom?

A guy named Bonaparte thought Jacquard’s loom was just the thing to put the French textile industry on the map and the English textile industry in the toilet (remember, toilet paper, hadn’t been invented not even the stingy, scratchy single-sheet European kind. For that matter, neither had the mechanical toilet.) So he issued a patent, it perhaps never having occurred to him that the English have no respect for French patents, or French anything, for that matter, and were copying it once news of the Jacquard became known . . . because Bonaparte issued a patent for it.

Now, skip ahead a few years to the industrial revolution, when Jacquard looms were hooked up to a hyper-polluting power source sending thousands of weavers to the pauvre house. Whereupon they began tossing their wooden shoes, sabots, into their Jacquards, thereby adding the word “saboutage” to several languages.

Except that’s a lie.

See how gullible you are if, like Herman Hollerith, you spend all your time thinking about machinery.

There is no historical record anywhere of any French weaver throwing his shoes at a loom.

Probably the word comes from the simple fact that French weavers wore wooden shoes because they were cheap and looked so rustically cool in Impressionist paintings.

Actually, the English word “Luddite” does come from loom smashing.

A retarded man named Ned Lud, or Ludd, or Ludlam, or possibly Smith or Smedly-Symington, as far as that goes, since there’s no record of his even having existed at all, smashed a knitting square with a hammer, or his fist because he was beaten for idleness, or for licentiousness, or because he was taunted by some street urchins, or because he misunderstood an order from his father.

At any rate, during the aforementioned Industrial Revolution, when English weavers smashed machinery in  protest, they protested that “Ned Lud did it.”

Now, skip ahead another century or so and you find an economy grievously ravaged by the further wonders of the Jacuquad loom when you have five billion Chinese sitting around with nothing to do but put the U.S. textile industry out of business for pennies a day.

Grievous unless you’re Walmart, which is really good at ravaging.

All of which gets us back to Hollerith’s folly.

Fascinated by all those beautifully voluminous numbers his new machine was turning out, it never occurred to him what a census is; more important, what it does.

A census, like any statistical study, is merely an object of interpretation.

Further, the accuracy of any complex mechanical mathematical calculation depends entirely on where you set the decimal, or where you “round off” figures.

Add an additional number to the numbers after the decimal, and you can, in large calculations, arrive at a different solution by several whole numbers.

So while Hollerith was certainly aware that adding numbers before the decimal, he never considered that adding number after it would have the same effect.

He was not concerned with the effect; merely the mechanics.

For example, the quicker, sexier census of 1890 led Frederic Jackson Turner to the conclusion that there were no more appreciable amounts of free land available in the United States, and we would no longer have any place for the dregs of society to flee, seeking new opportunities to become prosperous and happy citizens.

The effects of this kind of thinking, popularized and politicized as it has been, exhibits the foolishness of basing thinking on mathematical calculations.

That assumes that society actually has dregs.

You can see them right there, numbers of people who make small numbers of money, commit large numbers of crimes, live in specific numerically classifications of neighborhoods, have low numbers of years of formal education, and numerically think and act according to calculated patterns of behavior.

It could never be that some people are perfectly happy with a bib apron, a paper hat and a week’s worth of pot.

Or that armed robbery doesn’t have so much to do with education levels other than people making the same kind of decisions about both.

Or maybe there are no drugs; maybe that for those who base our decisions in terms of statistical analysis,  the land of opportunity just doesn’t offer all that many opportunities to anybody but those who are willing to sell souls or settle for less.