Jules Verne et la binarisation / Jules Verne and Binarization

 https://www.academia.edu/127441772/Jules_Verne_et_la_binarisation

 

Henri Habrias

Henri.habrias@univ-nantes.fr

Jules Verne and Binarization

Preliminary Note

We hesitated over the title of this paper. The English word “digital” is usually translated into French as numérique. However, what we wish to discuss here is the representation of information by positions that take their values from a set containing only two elements. We therefore ultimately preferred the term “binarization.” We did not follow Hetzel’s advice to Jules Verne: “Avoid neologisms at the beginning!”

Introduction

The word ordinateur was coined in 1955, following a consultation by IBM France with Jacques Perret, professor of Latin philology at the Sorbonne (he had referred to God as “the great ordinateur of the universe”). The word informatique was invented in 1962 by Philippe Dreyfus. The latter, former director of Bull’s National Electronic Computing Centre, used it to name a new company, the SIA (Société d’Informatique Appliquée). The Académie Française provided an official definition in 1966. At the time, the adjectives “numérique” and “binaire” were hardly ever used.

I remember buying, in 1969, a small book published at the time about calculating machines. The author presented the alternative: analog versus binary. This was the period when, at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, there was an exhibit (which I never saw and could not verify from one of my professors’ accounts) of a machine that simulated the French economy using flows of liquid, valves, etc. Whether digital or analog would prevail was by no means obvious to the author of our little book.

Michel Serres noted that Jules Verne had neither invented nor foreseen anything from a technological point of view. When Jules Verne imagined inventions for a particular purpose, the future has most often shown that the purpose was not achieved using the techniques of his time. The journey to the Moon did take place, but not with a projectile fired from a cannon.

Following the publication of Paris in the Twentieth Century, it was written that Jules Verne had invented the computer.

We wondered whether Jules Verne had been visionary with regard to computing and, more precisely, whether he had perceived the development of binarization.

We compiled a list of inventions prior to and contemporary with Jules Verne that might have led him to foresee the future development of binarization, and we examined Jules Verne’s works.
This is what we present here.

“Identifying these significant emergences and their essential connections with the fields of computing and communication technologies (radio, internet, streaming, etc.) (…) we could see in these hypotheses the realization of adventures already described and imagined by Jules Verne, when he depicts the first electroacoustic concert in 1863 and the first networked concert in 1875, following the scientific discoveries of Caselli (Pantélégraphe, 1859), David Hughes (the telegraph with a piano interface, 1859) and Elisha Gray in 1874 with his musical telegraph that enabled the first remote musical experiment in Philadelphia: the pianist Frederik Boskovitz played simple melodies on the keyboard and the music was immediately transmitted to New York (this experiment is very close to the one described by Jules Verne in his lecture at the Amiens Academy, entitled Une Ville Idéale), and this well before the application of Clément Ader’s Théâtrophone in 1881” (citing Une Ville Idéale of 1875 and Paris in the Twentieth Century) (http://collectivejukebox.org)

A Brief History of Automatic Computation, Communication, and Their Surroundings in Jules Verne’s TimeIn the 16th century, Francis Bacon invented a code for encrypting diplomatic messages: binary encoding.
Around 1623, Wilhelm Schickard built an adding machine that he described in a letter to Johannes Kepler.In 1642, Blaise Pascal built the Pascaline, later improved by Leibniz, who added multiplication and division.
In 1673, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz built a mechanical calculator (called the Stepped Reckoner) using a drum with unequal teeth. The mechanism consisted of an adder (like the Pascaline), a precursor of the carriage used in future office machines, and a crank to move a notched wheel. Leibniz’s fame stems more from his invention of differential and integral calculus and his refinement of binary arithmetic. He advocated the use of binary notation for calculations (“Explanation of Binary Arithmetic with Remarks on Its Utility and on the Meaning It Gives to the Ancient Figures of Fu Xi”). Leibniz imagined a “cylindrical grammar” that would provide all the theorems belonging to a given formal system. We know he wanted to design a “universal characteristic” (“This is the main goal of that great science which I am accustomed to call Characteristic, of which what we call Algebra is only a very small branch. For it is to words what the Characteristic is to languages, letters to words, numerals to Arithmetic, notes to Music; it is what teaches us the secret of fixing reasoning and forcing it to leave visible traces on paper in a small space, so that it may be examined at leisure. It is, finally, what allows us to reason at little cost by putting characters in place of things, thus unburdening the imagination”) to reduce logical operations to calculation.In 1775, Charles Earl Stanhope’s machine (the inventor, among other things, of the entirely metal printing press that would multiply daily output tenfold) performed multiplications and included a carry-over system. Stanhope’s demonstrator (1777) could handle syllogisms using Venn diagrams.
In 1730, Falcon considered using punched cards for the loom.
It was in 1805 that Joseph-Marie Jacquard applied Falcon’s principle and invented the automatic loom programmed by punched cards. The punched card is the visible manifestation of binarization.In 1800, William Crooke invented the cathode-ray tube.
In 1822, Charles Babbage built the prototype of his Difference Engine (a calculating machine based on finite differences), then conceived his Analytical Engine, which was to be programmable. It was to include a mill (to process numbers) and a store (where numbers, including intermediate calculation results—the working memory—were kept), made of wheels and gears. Instructions were entered via punched cards. Lord Byron’s daughter, Augusta Ada King, Lady Lovelace, Babbage’s pupil and later collaborator, was the first programmer in history: she wrote programs for Babbage’s machine. She introduced the iterative structure and the term “algorithm” in honor of Al-Khwarizmi. This machine was never built, whereas the Difference Engine, in a revised version, won a gold medal at the 1855 Paris Exhibition. However, Babbage’s son Henry P. took up the work and, starting in 1880, began building part of the machine. In 1910 he completed the assembly of part of the mill (the processing unit) and the printing mechanism. Independently of Babbage, the Irishman Percy Ludgate designed a universal machine described in 1909 with original solutions such as subroutines on program cylinders, program and input/output on perforated tape, and operator commands via keyboard (commands that could also be entered on perforated tape).Punched cards were used by Hollerith’s machine, designed to speed up the processing of data from the 1890 U.S. population census.
In 1829, Charles Xavier Thomas, former army commissioner during the Spanish War and then director of the insurance company Le Soleil, developed his arithmometer, which he presented at the 1855 Exhibition; 1,500 units were sold between 1823 and 1878, 40 % of them exported.
In 1831, Joseph Henry demonstrated the possibility of transmitting messages over a distance using only a current source, a switch, and an electromagnet (the first one he built). He invented the electrical relay for telephony. In 1893 his name was given to the unit of inductive resistance.
In 1837, Samuel Morse (cited by Verne on the first page of A Day in the Life of an American Journalist) created his telegraphic code.
In 1843, Alexander Bain filed a patent for an “autographic telegraph.” Images were broken down line by line into black and white segments and transmitted in Morse code.
In 1854, George Boole published The Mathematical Analysis of Logic.
In 1854, Charles Bourseul stated in L’Illustration what would become the principle of the telephone.
In 1856, Abbé Giovanni Caselli invented the pantélégraphe, the ancestor of the fax, which could transmit the sender’s autograph (and of course drawings, plans, etc.). It is described in the Traité de physique élémentaire by Dion and Fernet, published by Masson in 1883. Caselli solved the synchronization problems between transmitter and receiver. After a first experiment between Paris and Amiens in 1860, it was used on the Paris–Lyon–Marseille line. It could transmit a 26 cm × 11 cm manuscript in 20 minutes. In 1893, Christophe, in La Famille Fenouillard, also mentions the device. A planned experiment in Beijing (which would have solved the problem of transmitting ideograms) came to nothing, and it was the Japanese who popularized the fax! (http://www.miracle.qc.ca)In 1859, Joseph Farcot improved Watt’s ball governor and invented the servomotor and feedback. A similar device was invented by John McFarlane Gray in England at the same time.
In 1860, Philipp Reis built and marketed his “telephone,” which could transmit musical sounds but not speech.
In 1865, Claude Bernard demonstrated the importance of feedback in physiology.
In 1867, Christopher Latham Sholes improved John Pratt’s machine and invented the typewriter; the patent filed in 1868 was sold to the gunsmith Remington & Sons.
In 1869, W. S. Jevons (chemist, economist, logician) built a logic piano for teaching Boolean logic. Logical expressions were entered via a keyboard and the Boolean result was displayed.
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell successfully transmitted a sentence.
In 1877, Thomas A. Edison developed the first carbon microphone. What can be considered the first French telephone exchange was installed at the end of the same year in Paris (Frédérick Gower’s system). He also invented the phonograph and the electric lamp.
In 1878, David Hughes invented the microphone made of cylindrical carbon rods (cited by Jules Verne on the first page of Paris in the Twentieth Century).
In 1879, Clément Ader created the first French vibrating-plate devices. The Théâtrophone was born from telephone retransmissions of performances.
In 1880 the Société Générale des Téléphones was founded. In 1889 the state telephone monopoly was created.
In 1886, Charles Peirce (inventor of truth tables) and Allan Marquand (engineer, who built a machine in 1881) had shown that Boolean logic could be implemented with electrical relay circuits. This was later taken up by Claude Shannon in 1937.
In 1878, Ramon Valea invented a calculator with an internal multiplication table.
In 1884, the comptometer manufactured by Dorr E. Felt was the first keyboard adding machine that allowed all the digits of a number to be entered at once. It remained in use until the early 20th century.
In 1884 the NCR (National Cash Register) was founded.
In 1889, Léon Bollée’s multiplier (inventor of the first gasoline automobile and organizer of the first 24 Hours of Le Mans) used a Pythagorean table in the form of pegs and metal plates. A single turn of the crank was enough to perform a multiplication. It won the gold medal at the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition.
In 1892, William Steward Burroughs manufactured a calculating machine and obtained the first American patent for such a device. He also invented the cash register.
In 1895, Guglielmo Marconi conducted the first radio-transmission experiments.
It was in 1896 that the TMC was born—one of the founding companies of IBM.

Jules Verne’s References

In A Day in the Life of an American Journalist in 2889, published in English in 1889 in the American magazine The Forum, Jules Verne presents a “telephotic line” that allows journalists to have a live view of events. Delayed viewing is also possible using montages of past scenes. Nothing is said about the technology (analog or digital).

We also learn that when the journalist wants to stop the accounts of his newspaper, he uses “the progress of modern mechanics,” the “electric piano-counter.” Jules Verne speaks of “mechanics,” not of “logic.”

In the posthumous work, a youthful work by Jules Verne published in 1998, Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863), he writes:

“There was a long way from the time when Pascal built an instrument of this sort, whose conception seemed so marvellous then. Since that time, the architect Perrault, the Earl of Stanhope, Thomas de Colmar, Mauret and Jayet have brought happy improvements to this type of apparatus.” (p. 68). Further on he mentions Lenoir’s machine, Wheatstone’s telegraphic system, and Caselli’s “photographic telegraphy.”

Jules Verne does not address the underlying theory of the machines he stages. He is interested in the functions of the machines.

The Two Approaches to Automata

The theory of automata (Dominique Perrin, Les débuts de la théorie des automates)—an abstract model of a machine that has states and transitions between states. From a state s1, reading a symbol e moves to a state s2—dates only from the beginning of the 20th century. It is often considered to begin with the publication of S.C. Kleene’s article in 1956, in which the equivalence is established between what are now called “regular languages” (or “rational languages”) and “finite automata.” Every computer science student must have Kleene’s theorem in their first-year baggage.Kleene wrote his article following a request from the Rand Corporation. He was to study a 1943 paper by W. McCulloch and W. Pitts that introduced what would later be called neural networks.
In fact, two approaches were taken. In the more concrete one, we have a network whose nodes perform transformations (one may think of the Saint-Simonian networks, the electrical network, the telephone network so important to Jules Verne). In the 19th century the theory of electrical circuits was developed (Gustav Robert Kirchhoff). In the other, states are an abstraction. In terms of R. Milner’s modern theory of “communicating sequential processes,” a state is seen as a possible behaviour (a regular expression) when one is in that state. Evelyne Barbin has shown that historically logicians such as Kleene followed the first approach, while engineers followed the second.

The Map and the Territory

We have not found in Jules Verne’s writings any premonitions of automata theory, which is the foundation of theoretical computer science.

For the logician, the territory is a model of the map. The map is a formal object, a mathematical structure. “Assuming one specifies the number or nature of the elements, the nature of the operations, the model of the said structure appears.” Michel Serres, in a lecture he gave in Nantes in the late 1970s, illustrated this concept with an analysis of La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb.” He explains different models of the order structure (stronger-weaker, biological model, upstream-downstream, spatial model, parent-child, genealogical model, etc.).

Jules Verne made extensive use of the network metaphor. But he does not appear to have perceived the abstraction/reification that is modeling. He remained with the first approach to automata mentioned above.

Conclusion

It seems to us that we can corroborate Michel Serres’ statement. Jules Verne did not invent the computer, nor, more generally, digital calculation. We cite Verne’s contacts with specialists in ballistics, geography, chemistry, physiology, natural history and mining. But not with those in the fields we have mentioned in this paper.

We belong to the generation that devoured Verne (in digest form!) in the Bibliothèque Verte books, until the day we discovered the Hetzel re-editions. We are far from having read the immense corpus of Verne (Jules Verne texts website: http://jv.gilead.org.il/works.html) (Jean-Pierre Picot, Jules Verne, pour un centenaire, Revue Europe, Jan.–Feb. 2005, issue devoted to Jules Verne)! Perhaps Vernians will tell us where, in Verne’s works, they recognize the scientific and technical discoveries that implement digitalization.

Thomas Watson Jr., son of IBM’s founder, estimated in 1950 that the market for electronic computers would need only 18 machines!
Sales executives of large companies had announced that seven computers installed around the world would be enough to meet total demand for computerization. The future founder of Intel claimed there was no room for more than four computers in the world.

Who will cast the first stone at Jules Verne for not having foreseen, in his time, the tidal wave of binarization?