Free Jacquards' Web by James Essinger

of the meadows on the hills that ripple around the town. This wool was woven by hand into an inexpensive, coarse, long-lasting woollen cloth called kersey.
    There was a huge demand for this cloth throughout Britain and abroad for workmen’s breeches and trousers.
    Charles Babbage
    1753
    ’s father, Benjamin, born in
    , gradually
    built up his activities in the town and the surrounding district. He did not open a bank, but traded more informally, lending out sums, transacting business under his own name, and acting as an agent for some London banks. Business was excellent.
    Yet by the start of the 1790 s, the Totnes cloth trade was visibly waning. Machines powered by steam were making an 50
    From weaving to computing
    impact on weaving and on all aspects of fabric-making. The new form of power provided what seemed at the time to be close to unlimited energy. The steam engine also offered the enormous advantage that it was no longer necessary for mills and factories to be located near running water for operating water-wheels.
    Coal was the fuel of the future, and in this new industrial world Totnes was at a grave disadvantage, for Devon had no coal at all.
    The Industrial Revolution was gathering momentum. Totnes was being left behind.
    A wily fellow by nature, Benjamin was quick to spot the significance of the new developments. He rapidly made plans to transfer his business activities to London, a radical move indeed in those days, when the vast majority of the population lived out their lives in the village or town where they had been born. It has been said that many people who lived in villages at this time, and for another century or so, never met more than about seventy-five people in their entire lives.
    Benjamin moved to London in 1791 , taking with him his wife, Betty, whom he had married the year before. He had first-class business contacts in the capital. Benjamin eventually became a partner of Praeds Bank in London, probably one of the banks for which he had acted on an agency basis back in Devon.
    His timing for his move to London was highly fortuitous, yet Benjamin had always made his own luck, and there was really nothing accidental about his success in London. He chose to migrate to the great capital—then easily the largest city in the world—at a time when there was a huge increase in the demand for credit, mainly caused by the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. The banking business was literally a golden opportunity for lenders who could keep their heads and who had the skill to distinguish good credit risks from bad. Benjamin possessed that skill.
    As the novels of the time were wont to put it—he ‘prospered exceedingly’.
    The only surviving portrait of Benjamin shows a man with a rather jovial expression, and the look of having a precise under-51

    Jacquard’s Web
    Benjamin Babbage: a harsh and money-obsessed
    man whose money funded his son’s life’s work.
    standing of his importance in the world and his success. Little else, however, is known about his personality except what can be inferred from the letters about him written by his son Charles and Charles’s wife Georgiana.
    Judging from the letters, Benjamin was frequently prone to moods that were anything but jovial, at least in how he treated his eldest son. Indeed, the verbal picture these letters paint of Benjamin suggest that he could on occasion resoundingly con-form to the now almost clichéd image of the wealthy, nineteenth-century businessman, the sort of man for whom money has become not so much a simple measure of business success as an all-consuming religion. Benjamin was often impatient with Charles and abusive to him, frequently accusing him of failing to 52
    From weaving to computing
    make serious career plans for the future, even indeed initially refusing to approve his wish to marry Georgiana until he had made safe headway in some suitable recognized profession.
    Charles found his father’s attitude difficult to fathom;