January 28, 2017 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Continuing with Menabrea - 6
We are continuing with the treatise of
Menabrea:
“Sketch of the Analytical Engine” that was
translated into French by Ada Lovelace and published along with her notes in
1842.
We will continue with his description of
the automation in Jacquard’s Loom.
“Formerly, this process was lengthy and
difficult, and it was requisite that the workman, by attending to the design
which he was to copy, should himself regulate the movements the threads were to
take.
Thence arose the high price of this
description of stuffs, especially if threads of various colors entered into the
fabric.
To simplify this manufacture, Jacquard
devised the plan of connecting each group of threads that were to act together,
with a distinct lever belonging exclusively to that group.”
(As you would recall from my own bedtime
stories of past, Joseph Marie Jacquard merely happened to be at the right place
at the right time.
He had simply rediscovered and assembled
the cornucopia of discoveries that were already in place in the Paris museum by
the cumulative innovations of Basile Bouchon, Jean-Baptiste Falcon and Jacques
Vaucanson.
Napoleon Bonaparte needed to boost the
French Silk Industry as the country was in serious financial crisis post
revolution and multiple wars.
On a visit to Lyon he had approved of the
contraption that Jacquard had set up for display to the visiting royalties.
The rest, as they say, is history –
Storytelling Chimpanzee).
“All these levers terminate in rods, which
are united together in one bundle, having usually the form of a parallelepiped
with a rectangular base.”
(A parallelepiped is any three-dimensional
figure with sex faces, each of which is a parallelogram – Storytelling
Chimpanzee).
“The rods are cylindrical, and are
separated from each other by small intervals.
The process of raising the threads is thus
resolved into that of moving these various lever-arms in the requisite order.
To effect this, a rectangular board of
pasteboard (card stocks like those that you see in business cards or playing
cards) is taken, somewhat larger in size than a section of the bundle of
lever-arms.
If this sheet be applied to the base of the
bundle, and an advancing motion be them communicated to the pasteboard, the
latter will move with it all the rods of the bundle, and consequently the
threads are then connected with each of them.
But if the pasteboard, instead of being plane,
were pierced with holes corresponding to the extremities of the levers which
meet it, then, since each of the levers would pass through the pasteboard
during the motion of the latter, they would all remain in their places.
We thus see that it is easy so to determine
the positions of the holes in the pasteboard, that, at any given moment, there
shall be a certain number of levers, and consequently of parcels of threads,
raised, while the rest remain where they were.
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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