134 | 13 INTRODUCING BANBURISmUS
notes to be played and identified where the pegs should be placed to play them. In modern terms,
it contained all the necessary information. Bouchon saw that the same could be done to govern
the weaving of patterns by his silk looms. In 1728 his assistant Jean-Baptiste Falcon replaced the
paper roll by a set of punched cards connected by ribbons in an endless loop. The idea really took
off in 1805 when it was incorporated into the highly successful Jacquard weaving loom.
Charles Babbage began work on his Difference Engine (Fig. 24.1) in 1823 but was unable to
complete it. He watched a Jacquard loom at work when travelling in Europe, and this contrib-
uted to his plan for a more sophisticated Analytical Engine (Fig. 24.3) which he started design-
ing in 1834. The Jacquard loom also came to the notice of Ada Lovelace (Fig. 24.4). She was
the daughter of Lord Byron, but her forceful and intellectual mother took her away at an early
age from her father, who then abandoned them for Greece and an early death. As described in
Chapter 24, Ada’s mother took her to Babbage’s popular mathematical evenings, and in 1833
Ada wrote:^8
This machine [that is, the Jacquard loom] reminds me of Babbage and of his Gem of all
Mechanisms.
Lovelace (Ada’s married name) and Babbage developed an improbable but prolific mathemati-
cal collaboration. In her ‘Notes’ in 1843 on Menabrea’s ‘Notions sur la machine analytique de
M. Charles Babbage’ Lovelace wrote:^9
The distinctive characteristic of the Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible
to endow mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the executive
right-hand of abstract algebra, is the introduction into it of the principle which Jacquard devised
for regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication of
brocaded stuffs. It is in this that the distinction between the two engines lies. Nothing of the
sort exists in the Difference Engine. We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves
algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves . . . the machine might
compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
In modern terms, Lovelace moved forward from Babbage’s concept of a calculator to the con-
cept of a computer.
Some forty years after Lovelace wrote this passage, Herman Hollerith took up the idea that
data handling should be carried out by machines based on the Jacquard loom; and he won a
competition to process the returns of the 1890 US census with his punched-card machines. His
name remained attached to the technology even after the business became IBM and its variants,
and ‘Hollerith machinery’ monopolized the mechanized handling of data into the 1940s when
computers such as Bletchley Park’s Colossus and its successors elbowed it aside. The massive
Hollerith section at Bletchley Park may well have been the technology’s zenith in the UK, both
in terms of size and of technical skill. Located originally in Hut 7, and from 1942 in Block C, the
section was known colloquially as ‘the Freebornery’ after its head, Frederic Freeborn, seconded
from the British Tabulating Machine Company in Letchworth.
Banburies
Hut 8’s Banburismus also depended on punched holes, and so can be traced back to Basile
Bouchon.