Joseph Marie Charles,
July 7th, 1752
In the distant, mist filled, memory days of the late 1900s, as fellow historians are now obliged to call them, it was calculated (by nobody, because I’m making this bit up) that the average London bus contained space for 74 passengers. This naturally mean that each chuntering, choking, diesel death-machine contained at the very bare minimum 74 different things that were of a level fascinating enough to hold the stare of each of those passengers for the length of their journey. Posters, seat covers, warning signs about not talking to the driver (or anyone at all), bolts, stains, ripped ceiling tiles, discarded rubbish, shoes, the curve of a window, nothing at all, and, of course, windows. Look outside the window and you would see herds of people milling by, up and down the street, also, very studiously looking at the cornucopia of distracting nothings the world had laid out for them to peruse.
Euclidean Professors of Euclidean Things have calculated that during this period, not only were there enough things in the average London bus to distract the eyes of each and every passenger, but that by using a complicated geometric algorithm that still remains inherent in the birth-minds of every British person, each of those 74 different items could be stared at for the entirety of a bus journey without ever, once, having to catch the gaze of another human being.
As the population grew into the new millennium, the number of things that people were pretending to look at simply couldn’t keep pace and, faced with the daunting prospect of having to engage with fellow humans on public transport, the Jobs Singal went out across the oceans to where the universe’s favorite Man Who Got Other People to Do Things and Took All the Credit, Steve Jobs was called into action. Ever since Steve Jobs’ untimely passing, the position of Man Who Got Other People to Do Things and Took All the Credit is now taken by Elon Musk, a sort of melted Bond Villian who would absolutely live in a hollowed-out volcano if he hadn’t spent all his money turning social media into a fascist shitrag.
Luckily for Steve Jobs, the designer he paid to come with ideas for him was British and so Sir Jony Ives was tasked with solving the problem. Sir Jony came up with the iPhone which was designed purely to give British people on buses, and walking in the streets, something to look at. Even luckier, the world wide web was also invented by the British in the shape of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and so, by combining the two greatest inventions in the history of British innovation (although, to be fair, Britain also invented time, falling, dinosaurs and rocks), Steve Jobs was able to give British bus passengers not only nothing to look at, but something to look at it on, too.
And so, as we move towards the second quarter of the 21st Century, British people can safely negotiate the terrors of public transport, safe in the knowledge that they never have to mistakenly catch the eye of a fellow passenger, do the embarrassed smile thing, nod slightly or raise their eyebrows in acknowledgement, stifle a happy laugh and mouth “alright?”
”Alright?” is the standard British greeting and the only acceptable response to it is also “alright”.
”Alright?”
”Aright. Alright?”
”Alright”
If you are a tourist in the rain-sodden streets, diverse and exciting streets of England’s Capital (or, for that manner, any city in any of the UK’s constituent countries), then never ever reply to the enquiry ‘alright?’ with any sort of response that gives away how you actually are. This is a horrifying faux-pas.
The only other reply one can give to this enquiry would be something along the lines of “mustn’t grumble”, “not too bad”, or, at a push, “Oh…could be worse”.
If a British person says “Oh…could be worse”, then rest assured that things could not, even remotely possibly, be any worse.
So, there you go. Thanks for reading.
The iPhone was invented to allow British bus passengers to avoid the embarrassment of public interaction. Which might not be true, but it is sort of funny. I hope you enjoyed reading it and I’ll see you next time.
Oh! Wait! wait, wait, wait, wait! That’s not why we’re here, is it?
We’re here to talk about Joseph Marie Charles, who was born in Lyon, on July 7th, 1752. Which makes him French and therefore he is to blame for the iPhone, or by extension of his Frenchness, everything.
There is a certain demographic in the British population that hates the French and hates them for no discernible reason other than they are the French. As a consequence, they blame the French for everything. The French, who were the first nation on Earth to give themselves a ‘blue tick’ by adopting the name La France, The France, to differentiate themselves from all the other imposter Frances, approach this hatred with absolute indifference, of course. The only thing that this British demographic have over The France is victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, which is of no interest to anybody in The France whatsoever and as a consequence just meet the British goading with bemused shrugs. It’s the same response British people give when Americans try to crow about 1776. Nobody in Britain could give shit about that, either.
If it helps, everyone in The France, which is a magnificent country full of magnificently rude bastards and somewhere I lived for many happy years, hates everyone else too. They have made an art-form of it. They also think American food is as hideous as British food, just more sugary. Sorry about that.
The Couzon-Au-Mont d’Or suburb of Lyon had many branches of the Charles family and so the different ones were given nicknames. His parents Jean Charles, master weaver, and Antoinette Rive were nicknamed ‘Jacquard’. They had nine children, of which, shockingly, only Joseph Marie and his sister Clémence survived into adulthood.
When his father died in 1772, Joseph Marie inherited his father’s workshop, looms, house and vineyard, because everyone in The France has their own vineyard so they can have wine before breakfast. By 1778, Joesph Marie’s occupation was listed as weaver and silk merchant, although he also appears to skip around several jobs, including hat maker, real estate agent, print maker, soldier, bleacher, lime burner, book binder and cutlery maker.
On 26 July 1778, Joseph married Claudine Boichon, a rich widow who came with property and a substantial dowry which Joseph Marie, perhaps on another of what appears to be a long series of hair-brained schemes, blew in style. He sold everything to avoid bankruptcy and after a spell in the army, where Jean Marie, his son, died, he began the 19th Century by deciding he was now an inventor.
Which, to be fair, he appeared to be very good at.
In 1800, he invented a treadle loom. In 1803 he invented a loom to weave fishing nets and the following year, he invented the Jacquard Loom, which by a wonderful piece of serendipity had the same name as he did and which automatically weaved patterns into silk by use of a punch-card system. It was a bit rubbish.
He exhibited his loom at the Exposition des Produits de L’industrie Française in Paris, and from there he was invited to Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers where he was able to work on a loom built by Jacques de Vaucanson that perfected his own design.
The France, impressed by his work, declared that they owned it and paid Joseph Marie a pension and a royalty on each one they made. By 1811, there were 11,000 in France, much to the annoyance of the silk weavers who saw their jobs being taken by a machine.
The idea of an automatic mechanical loom operated by a punch-card system wasn’t Jacquard’s idea. Others, including Jacques de Vaucanson and Basile Bouchon had made versions earlier than Jacquard, but it was he who intergrated their designs into this own and perfected the process.
A roll of punch cards carrying the ‘pattern’ for the silk which allowed needles and hooks to pass through at certain points and automate the weaving of the color and pattern required.
Another weaver of Lyon, Jean Falcon, had built a reasonably successful machine by using a cylinder to hold each punch-card in place as the needles and hooks went to work. de Vaucanson moved the complicated weights and pulleys required to operate the automation away from the working of the loom itself, but this limited the amount of actual weaving the machine could do.
With Britain starting to dominate the industrial revolution in Europe, Napoleon Bonaparte tried to stimulate the silk weaving industry by ordering massive amounts of Lyon silk and by 1805, Jacquard had perfected elements of Falcon and de Vaucanson’s work to produce his machine that had obvious potential.
Bonaparte was delighted and bought the patent, or rather gave Jacquard money for the patent, presumably without much of a choice, and gave him 3,000 francs a year, and 50 francs for each one sold.
Jacquard died at Oullins (Rhône), 7 August 1834.
This image is often referred to as the earliest image in the history of computing. Woven in silk in 1839, it required 24,000 punch-cards to produce, it was only ever made to order.
One person who ordered one was Charles Babbage, the English mathematician and engineer who was inspired by Jacquard’s use of punch-cards to design what he called his ‘Analytical Engine’, the world’s first, hypothetical, digital, general-purpose, programmable computer.
Without Jacquard, Babbage wouldn’t have had a way to feed programs into his engine and without Babbage, IBM wouldn’t have had a way to feed programs into their pioneering digital computers on the 1960s and without IBM, bus passengers wouldn’t have nothing to look at and something to look at it on.
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I hope reading these articles is as much fun for you as writing them is for me.