MacCaulay
Banned
I was reading a magazine at the machine shop today and it had an article about a Frenchman by the name of Jacques de Vaucanson. Apparently he was big into automatons and other gadgets, which to be honest I'm not that interested in.
I was reading the article because he invented the all metal slide rest lathe, as I'm a set-up man on lathes and that's really what I was looking for in the magazine. So in any case, the article mentioned Vaucanson's work with the lathe, and how he more or less perfected it decades before it was popularized at the gunworks in Britain by Maudsley.
This is all well and good, and I could go on and on about how interesting that is to someone like me. This guy was making lathes like a sonofabitch, and all-metal ones too.
Then something at the end of the article blew me away: Vaucanson died while he was working on regulating the French silk industry. He had designed a mechanical loom that more or less took manual weaving out of the equation and only had the person load it. (So? Why is this important? You ask.)
The concept was that punch cards would be fed through the top, giving a modicum of control to the speed and movement of the loom.
Enter Joseph Marie Jacquard: this man took Vaucanson's design and improved on it, taking multiple punch cards and putting them together into a string with each line on a card representing a line of pattern that the loom prints out.
For the machinists in the audience: in 1801, Vaucanson and Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a proto-NC tape machine.
NC is short for Numerical Coding, or the use of a code to tell a tool (in that case a loom) where to move and how. It was the precursor to CNC, or Computer Numerical Coding which allowed modern flight control surfaces of helicopters and jets to be built with accuracy and repetition. (literally: CNC was actually invented by a man who had a USAF helicopter contract from Sikorsky)
What Jacqaurd (or anyone else for that matter) didn't seem to put together for many decades was that the same punched cards that could move a loom (or a player piano) in incredibly precise and intricate steps could also be used for a lathe. Vaucanson was one of the few men who seemed to have both ideas at once, but he never put them together.
I don't really have any grand POD for this, but I thought I'd throw this out there for you guys to nibble at.
I was reading the article because he invented the all metal slide rest lathe, as I'm a set-up man on lathes and that's really what I was looking for in the magazine. So in any case, the article mentioned Vaucanson's work with the lathe, and how he more or less perfected it decades before it was popularized at the gunworks in Britain by Maudsley.
This is all well and good, and I could go on and on about how interesting that is to someone like me. This guy was making lathes like a sonofabitch, and all-metal ones too.
Then something at the end of the article blew me away: Vaucanson died while he was working on regulating the French silk industry. He had designed a mechanical loom that more or less took manual weaving out of the equation and only had the person load it. (So? Why is this important? You ask.)
The concept was that punch cards would be fed through the top, giving a modicum of control to the speed and movement of the loom.
Enter Joseph Marie Jacquard: this man took Vaucanson's design and improved on it, taking multiple punch cards and putting them together into a string with each line on a card representing a line of pattern that the loom prints out.
For the machinists in the audience: in 1801, Vaucanson and Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a proto-NC tape machine.
NC is short for Numerical Coding, or the use of a code to tell a tool (in that case a loom) where to move and how. It was the precursor to CNC, or Computer Numerical Coding which allowed modern flight control surfaces of helicopters and jets to be built with accuracy and repetition. (literally: CNC was actually invented by a man who had a USAF helicopter contract from Sikorsky)
What Jacqaurd (or anyone else for that matter) didn't seem to put together for many decades was that the same punched cards that could move a loom (or a player piano) in incredibly precise and intricate steps could also be used for a lathe. Vaucanson was one of the few men who seemed to have both ideas at once, but he never put them together.
I don't really have any grand POD for this, but I thought I'd throw this out there for you guys to nibble at.