His story starts with Jacquard, an unremarkable Frenchman until his breakthrough idea that looms, operated by laborers to create woven patterns, could be programmed by a series of cards with holes in them. Each card would act as an instruction to the machine, enabling it to produce elaborate woven fabrics at a much faster pace. He succeeded in patenting his idea, and then building looms powered by this new approach.
The book focuses on the history and evolution of Jacquard's simple principle as it has evolved under different inventors in different countries. This central idea of building a machine that could be programmed to understand basic rules and to follow specific instructions has taken shape in different and successively more powerful forms over time. Yet the key concept breathing life into the machine remains unchanged.
''Today our whole idea of how computers should be programmed and even what they should actually be can be traced directly back to the Jacquard loom and its punched cards," Essinger argues.
His book deftly shows how even the most surprising breakthroughs are based on the work of others, and need a host of enabling factors to take root. Without the appropriate financial, technological, and cultural factors, no inventor, regardless of passion, can harvest his brilliant machine.
For example, he devotes considerable material in this book to fabled inventor Charles Babbage, a London genius of the 1800s who saw the link between Jacquard's breakthrough and the promise of a computer, which he termed an Analytical Engine. Yet Babbage lacked the financial and technological resources to create a working version of his model.
Instead, his vision lay dormant until American inventor Herman Hollerith incorporated punch-card technology as the basis of a new tabulating machine that could transform the process of sifting through huge amounts of data.
Essinger's book imaginatively proves a key point: ''The progress of a new technology, far from following a clear, logical track, is generally a haphazard and even messy affair. Its success or failure will depend on a complicated web of dynamic, complex factors such as practical necessity, financial pressures, political considerations, and the personal needs and prejudices of the would-be inventor and of everybody else whose decisions affect the inventor's progress."
His tale of cultural, economic, and personal factors that enable ideas to become real tools makes this book a welcome addition to the literature of innovation.
