By 1566, at a time when the total population of Lyons was about 120000, more than one-tenth of these people were silk-weavers.
by the end of the sixteenth century, an actual majority of people living in Lyons depended either directly or indirectly on the silk industry for their livelihoods.
From the earliest days of the Lyons silk industry, the high price commanded by brocade meant that any improvement, however slight, in the speed of the drawloom could make a major contribution to the profits of a weaving studio. There was consequently every incentive for resourceful master-weavers, or the mechanics they employed, to try to do what they could in this direction.
Jacquard’s work illustrates an important principle of great inventions: they are rarely ideas plucked out of the air, but more often than not build on previous attempts to make a key breakthrough.
He was only one of Jacquard’s disciples, but he was the most brilliant, the most industrious, and the one who was least willing to take no for an answer.
Square, organized by a man who called himself ‘Merlin’.
Cambridge—like Oxford—had an illustrious reputation for learning, but the teaching of mathematics there left a great deal to be desired. Maths was not seen as a practical research topic that might have a key role to play in the world. Instead, it was regarded as a mental training for future clergyman, lawyers, and gentlemen who would live lives of genteel but unspectacular, and for the most part unproductive, learning.
Babbage desperately wanted to play his part in this revolution, so he withdrew from his formal curriculum at Cambridge and pursued his own mathematical and scientific agenda. At the time, gentlemen scholars were allowed to do this.
Babbage desperately wanted to play his part in this revolution, so he withdrew from his formal curriculum at Cambridge and pursued his own mathematical and scientific agenda. At the time, gentlemen scholars were allowed to do this.
When men with common pursuits in which they are deeply interested, correspond on the subject of those pursuits, the trifling ceremonials of an ordinary correspondence may in great measure be waived.
An undetected error in a logarithmic table is like a sunken rock at sea yet undiscovered, upon which it is impossible to say what wrecks may have taken place.
A confidence in the future, a conviction that life was getting better, a belief that man not only has the potential for happiness and self-fulfilment but has a duty actively to pursue these destinies; all these lay at the heart of so much nineteenth-century thinking. When a new and useful technology became practical and feasible it was invariably pressed into service without delay. This spirit of optimism governed thought and action. Above all, the age believed in the power of machinery to achieve almost anything.
geniuses need committed, visionary, and passionate disciples if they are to make the most of their ideas. Ada was precisely such a disciple, and Babbage was fortunate indeed she had decided to follow him.
She craved a husband who would do great things, be great, stride to fame and illustriousness with her by his side and understand her own pressing needs for an intellectual life.
Moulton painted a dismal picture of the price the gods had extracted from Babbage for having bestowed on him a vision of a computer, without granting him the tools—technological, financial, and diplomatic—to make his dreams come true.
As with every project he ever undertook, Hollerith made every effort in completing these assignments to standards that were not only high but even obsessively so.
The new organization started to trade as a consolidated unit on 5 July 1911. Its name, drawn from its separate components, was now the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, or C-T-R. It was not an age when organizations needed trendy, eye-catching names in order to succeed.
Hollerith had run his business activities like an extended one-man band, but Watson was a ‘big company’ man who believed in everyone pulling together under a strong unified corporate branding, focus, and purpose.
Watson pioneered what are today regarded somewhat erroneously as Japanese-style business practices decades before Japan actually got in on the act.
Watson believed that in business, as in life, things did not happen by accident but because you willed them to happen and took the practical steps to turn your wishes into reality.
Like religions, inventions tend to be created by lone geniuses but are typically developed and furthered by practical-minded, even ruthless, realists.
One of Watson’s many talents was a gift for winning over people who were smarter than he was and giving them key positions at IBM.
A repetitive program was usually inputted into the machine in the form of a loop of paper tape with the ends glued together.
It is clear to any reader of the Manual of Operation that Aiken considered Babbage to be his intellectual father.
The invention starts out at the source as an idea born in the mind of a remarkable innovator whom we may be entitled to regard as a genius. Gradually, like tributaries joining the main flow of the stream, other inventors and thinkers become involved. Finally, as the river approaches the ocean, it widens into a delta. There, hundreds or even thousands of expert technicians toil away in well-organized, well-funded, yet comparatively anonymous groups such as the research and development teams of major international corporations. The river’s flow into the ocean represents the idea’s comprehensive acceptance by the mainstream of human culture and society.