December 20, 2017 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Bouchon Sets the Stone Rolling
Bouchon’s loom depended on fragile
perforated papers for automation.
This often lead to torn papers, and torn
papers translated into upsetting of desired patterns.
Furthermore, weavers would not necessarily place
the paper in the desired order and place and this again would lead to serious
printing errors on the fabric.
Such fabric with disfigured patterns would
have to be discarded thereby becoming a source of loss for the owner.
Moreover, Bouchon’s loom could not take in heavy
load and would work only for a limited number of warp threats.
This set a limit to the productivity and
again was an economic liability.
So definitely Bouchon’s loom was in a dire
need of improvement but at least he had shown the way.
The next development came from yet another
master silk weaver from the same city of Lyon.
His name was Jean Falcon and in 1737 he
improvised on Bouchon’s contribution.
The first improvisation of Falcon’s was to
increase the number of warp yarns that the loom could manipulate at each moment
of time.
But it was the second improvisation that is
more relevant to our story at hand.
Seeing the fragility of punched out papers,
Falcon replaced the paper strip of Bouchon with punched cards.
Now each desired pattern was so-to-say
punched out on a stiff rectangular card arranged in a chain of series so that
multiple rows of hooks could now be manipulated simultaneously.
The card not only was more durable but in
positioning it there were less likely to be errors.
It sure was an improvement and in next
twenty years or so Falcon sold forty of his machines in the Lyonese market.
We know very well that innovation never
stops and one innovation only goads another entrepreneur to go one step
further.
So it was with the automation of looms.
Falcon’s idea got the attention of another
French inventor who goes by the name of Jacques de Vaucanson but pronounced as
Voo-kon-saun with all the ns ending with a nasal twang.
That is how the French speak though
nasalization is not limited to French as it is also found in other spoken
languages such as Hindi, Portuguese and some dialects of Chinese.
Vaucanson was born in poverty simply by
virtue of being the tenth child of a glove maker in the France of 1709.
His child hood was spent in getting good-for-nothing
religious education by the Jesuits but fortunately at a very young age he came
across a surgeon who gave him fairly decent knowledge of anatomy.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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