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We
live in a very complex world. Without
long distance communications aided by the use of computers, the modern
world would not function as it does.
We are able to organize ourselves better because of that.
To a certain extent, the modern world would fall apart without that
organizational ability. But
what will that organizational network, that telecommunications network,
due to us next? Well the answer to that question may lie in the past.
Because this kind of situation has happened before.
The last time a world empire fell apart was about 1500 years ago.
Then the empire was Roman. After
the fall of the Roman Empire, the Imperial provinces were cracked up into
small barbarian kingdoms. During
the dark ages, the one organization that still functioned internationally,
still traveled the Roman roads when no one else would, handling the king's
local and foreign affairs because its members could read and write, was
the Church. It had a fully
operational network of communications from Bishop to Bishop throughout
Europe, and that's what held things together.
The church than was like our telecommunications now.
And so the knowledge that the monks had accumulated gradually
spread. Knowledge like the waterwheel, and the gearing system that
made it so efficient, and the cam. By
the Middle Ages, there were mills all over using the waterwheel, the cam,
and trip hammers to work timber, oil, grain, cloth, iron, leather, beer,
wire, coin, and almost anything you can name at the time.
By the 13th century, it seemed that something was waiting
to happen. It is one of those
examples of the way change can come about quite unexpectedly.
The two inventions that were to trigger the great leap forward
could have never been foreseen in Europe because they came from China.
The Arabs brought them over. The
first was a new type of loom and because it ran by foot pedals it speeded
up weaving. It speeded it up
so much in fact that it caused a problem: not enough yarn to operate the
new looms. But the second
invention took care of that; the spinning wheel. Things
were going quite well for the times and with central points set up for
trading called “Champagne Fairs”, because they originated in the
Champagne Valley in France, and the introduction of commendas, investment
contracts that spread the financial risk, the economy boomed.
But a change of whether at the beginning of the 14th century caused
bad harvests and there were no surplus crops to sell. Famine spread and
money was tight and eventually the “Fairs” failed.
Then in 1347 the black plague settled in Europe.
By 1351 when it was over, it probably left some 40 million people
dead. The only good thing
from the plague was that the dead left their money to the living, if you
could stay alive long enough to spend it. After the plague, people spent that money on the wildest outfits they could buy. If you were rich, it was silk. For the middle classes, wool and velvet. And the peasants, there thing was linen. Well it was everybody's thing in hats, shirts, bed sheets, and underwear. And that's the historical trigger of change. The first result of the 14th century bed linen and underwear boom was that the person who used to collect bones for fertilizer, started collecting used linen as well. He became a rag and bone man. The second result was that there was a great pile of linen rag. If you shred the linen and mix it with water and gum, and pound with hammers tripped by cams for 48 hours, the sludge you get is paper pulp. Now the accumulative technology starts coming together. The automated loom makes the linen. Water power runs the cams that trip the hammers to make the pulp. Winepresses are converted to linen presses to squeeze out the water. And because of all the free linen, suddenly the cheapest thing around is paper. But because the plague killed off half the clerks, the cost of the man to write on the paper skyrocketed. So now you have cheap paper and expensive clerks.
By 1500, Venice had become the printing capital of the world. It was also full of Greek refugees, from when the Turks invaded Greece in 1453. Aldus Manutius hired the Greek refugees and first turned out dictionaries and grammar books of the Greek language, so his customers could learn to read them, and then proceeded to publish every major Greek classic in existence. And came up with the kind of print needed to pack a lot into a small space, italic. He also gave the world one more thing to worry about: the small print. By the time of his death in 1515, there were some 20 million books in circulation.
At
the start of the 18th century, there was a mania for Chinese fashions that
was sweeping Europe and driving the French silk weavers out of their minds
trying to weave the more complicated fashions.
Then in 1725, a weaver from Lyons, Basile Bouchon, whose father was
an automated organ maker, solved the problem by putting perforated paper
over a role as a control mechanism. The
needles would only pass-through where the holes were. Unfortunately, the paper tore and weavers place them in the
wrong position. Then in 1740,
another weaver from Lyons named Falcone, took it a step further. He put each pattern on a separate and durable card that took
care of the positioning. But
in 1750, one of the greatest machine makers of all-time named Vaucanson,
automated the entire process. He
put the card on a cylinder, mounted on a chassis, and used water power to
drive it. As the cylinder
turned, it clicked forward one row of holes automatically each time.
But that process put people out of work and his loom sat in the
Paris Museum of Arts and Crafts for the next 50 years. It
wasn't until 1800, when another weaver was asked to put it together and in
doing so, made some changes. He
put Vaucanson's idea together with Falcon's cards and with that minor
amendment he got all the glory. Because
to this day, the entire concept is named after this man, Jacquard. He gave the world the Jacquard loom. The
French were not able to capitalize on this concept because of the
Revolution, so the idea traveled to England, where it was used to control
the automation of riveting machines for the new iron ships that would
carry emigrants to the New World. In
the years between 1850 and 1880, some 8 million emigrants came into this
country. And though they
didn't know it, these emigrants were to trigger off the development of one
of the modern world's most extraordinary conventions.
However, because of the census that was taken every ten years,
these emigrants had to be found and counted.
An Army surgeon, who was working on the census, mentioned to his
young engineer assistant, that Jacquard cards, with their punched holes,
could be used to carry information. So
his young assistant worked on the idea and came up with this. The census information was transferred to the cards and by
punching holes in them according to a code, and were then fed into a
machine he called a tabulator. By
letting pins drop down through the holes, electrical contact was made and
the machine counted the information that was on the punched card.
He made the cards the same size as a dollar bill of the time
because there were already available holders for them.
He also developed a sorter so that the more detailed analysis that
was required of the census was available.
The 1880 census took over seven years to complete.
The 1890 senses took less than half that time and after checking it
twice, the number was 62,947,714. Oh,
the name of the young engineer assistant if you haven’t guessed by now
was Herman Hollerith.
Hollerith
it wasn't the only one to see the scope of Jacquard’s punched cards.
In the 1830s, English inventor Charles Babbage conceived an
automatic digital computer and envisioned the punched card for an
input/output medium. He
called it an analytical engine, but was never completed because precision
techniques for fabricating metal parts to close tolerances had not yet
been developed. His invention
had been forgotten until his writings were discovered in 1937. Also
of great significance to our story was the work of English mathematician
and logician George Boole. In
1847 and 1854 Boole published demonstrations that the propositions of
logic can be expressed by a set of mathematical rules known today as
Boolean algebra. His direct
influence on the design of the digital computer circuitry dates from the
work of the American mathematician Claude Shannon, who in 1938 pointed out
that the behavior of switching circuits, which have only two signal states
(i.e. on and off), could be expressed in a two value algebra. Then
in 1939, a U.S. mathematician and physicist named John Atanasoff, built a
breadboard prototype of an electromechanical digital computer, a feature
of which was the first known use of electronic vacuum tubes for
computation. Now
most people wouldn't think that Adolf Hitler was in any way responsible
for the development of the computer, but it was his military aggression in
Europe in the 1930’s that spurred the development of the machine that
would significantly contribute to his downfall.
Communication is essential for modern warfare and safeguarding that
communication may well determine the success or failure of the campaign.
The Germans prior to world war II, had developed electromechanical
devices known as the Enigma and the Geheimschreiber (secret writer) for
encording messages vital for their expansion efforts, that were thought
unbreakable. A special
purpose, all-electronic computing machine called Colossus had been
developed earlier at Bletchley Park, near London, and was designed to
decipher codes generated by these machines.
The project was called ULTRA, for ultra-secret.
It gave the allies forewarning of many of the war plans and supply
schedules of the German war machine, hastening victory for them. But
it was the concept of the stored program computer, credited to Hungarian
born American mathematician John Von Neumann, that brought about the
development of digital computers in their present form.
The first operational stored program electronic digital computer
(what is today simply called a computer) was completed at the University
of Cambridge in 1949 under the direction of Maurice Wilkes, an English
mathematician. The trail has brought us from the water wheel to the loom, and the linen that it produced that made paper so cheap it spurred the development of printing, of books who interested people in things like automated organs, whose peg cylinders gave the French silk weavers the opportunity to run their looms with perforated cards that Hollerith had used to count emigrants that once passed through Ellis Island. Gateway to the one country, that more than any other, would fall apart if it weren't for the Hollerith card, used to program the computers, without whose help the entire massive structure of the modern world, as we know it, would fall down.
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