The 18th century saw, long before anything that could be considered an automatic computer, the emergence of several concepts and technologies that would play an important role in their development.
Among those are punched cards as a method for storing programs for sequence-controlled machines. At the time, sequence control was commonly used for textile looms, where weaving patterns were defined using perforated paper rolls. Jean-Baptiste Falcon and Basile Bouchon improved upon this concept in 1728 by building a loom that was programmed using wooden punched cards, tied together with strings. This more robust and essentially modular way of storing programs caught on, was adapted to other devices and improved upon by other inventors, such as Joseph Marie Jacquard with his own loom head design in 1801. It was an especially big step forward compared to other established methods of storing control sequences, such as the tedious knotted ropes, or expensive to produce cog cylinders.
Punched cards proved to be a very successful concept. A couple of decades after Jacquard’s improvements, in the 1830s, Charles Babbage was planning to use them to program his unrealised Analytical Engine, and Herman Hollerith applied punched cards to the problem of storing data rather than programs towards the end of the 19th century. The cards were a primary way of data storage for computers far into the 20th century, to be replaced only by magnetic storage methods.
Another technology that was experimented with heavily, and fruitfully, over the course of the 18th century was the electrical telegraph. The tempting vision of sending messages over wires at the speed of light, a revolution in long-distance communication, saw many parallel strands of development. Early proposals would rely on one wire for each letter in the alphabet. It would be some decades into the 19th century until successful systems would be implemented on a usable scale, most notably the Morse telegraph by Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail in the U.S., along with the Morse code, which can be reduced to a binary code to be transmitted over a single wire.
This first form of electrical communication allowed instant transmission of messages over long distances and even between continents. The electrical telegraph is a direct predecessor to telephones and computer networks, the importance of which for the history of computers and computer games does not need to be spelled out.
As an amusing side note, 1769 saw the first presentation of a widely popular attraction built by a Hungarian inventor, Johann Wolfgang Ritter von Kempelen: The Turk, the first chess-playing automaton. Paying patrons were given the chance to play a game of chess against a humanoid machine that actually used its arms to move the pieces. Of course, the secret behind this was something less anachronistic than the first computer chess algorithm.
The ingeniously designed playing table actually housed a compartment for a human chess player, who was able to observe the contestant’s moves through magnets fitted under the chessboard. The operator in the compartment also controlled the automaton’s response by using an elaborate mechanical arm on an internal representation of the chessboard, which would translate into the figure moving its arm to carry out the moves on the outside. Details such as visible, non-functional machinery parts, a clockwork ticking sound while The Turk was “thinking”, as well as the operator winding up the machine with a key, supported the illusion. Proof that long before computers, people liked the idea of playing games against non-human, automatic opponents.
References
- The History of Computing Project Timeline: 1672-1770
- Wikipedia: Punched card
- Wikipedia: Jacquard loom
- Wikipedia: Electrical telegraph
- Wikipedia: The Turk
- Wikipedia: Wolfgang von Kempelen
- Picture “Jacquard loom”: Wikimedia Commons (Picture by Mahlum, Public Domain)
- Picture “Collins Overland Telegraph Cabin on Lake” by John Clayton White: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
- Picture “The Turk” by Joseph Racknitz: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
