Before 1930

The period from 1700 to 1930 radically transformed our humanity. These two centuries, marked by industrialization and its social upheavals, laid the foundations for the computing that was about to emerge.

The 18^th century saw Europe ignited by an unprecedented intellectual fervor. The Enlightenment imposed a worldview where science and reason took the throne. Inventors, driven by frenzied curiosity, sought to tame the universe through numbers and mechanisms. Scientific academies multiplied like buzzing hives of new ideas, weaving their networks across the old continent.

Around 1760, Great Britain was shaken by the first convulsions of the industrial revolution. Nascent factories swallowed workers whole and machines gradually replaced human hands. Industrialists, confronted with the growing complexity of their enterprises, demanded precise tools to juggle their figures. This thirst for arithmetic precision pushed inventors to devise mechanical solutions to the most laborious calculations.

The end of the century witnessed the emergence of the first mechanized devices in textile mills. Joseph-Marie Jacquard transformed weaving in 1801 with his punched cards that dictated patterns for the looms to reproduce. These seemingly innocuous perforated cardboard rectangles carried within them the seed of future computer systems. Each hole, each solid space represented binary information that the machine interpreted without error, a striking prefiguration of digital memories.

The 19^th century opened in a whirlwind of change. Empires stretched their tentacles to the four corners of the globe, trade intensified, creating a visceral need for rapid communications. The railway, that steel monster devouring space, imposed clock synchronization and rigorous schedule management. Modern states swelled their administrations, which soon drowned beneath mountains of paperwork.

George Boole, an English mathematician with an incisive mind, published his theory of logical algebra in 1847. Though seemingly of interest only to a few eccentric scholars, his work contained the key that would one day unlock the doors of computing. His binary system, reducing every proposition to true or false, patiently awaited visionary minds to seize upon it.

The electric telegraph, copper wires stretched from one continent to another, shattered the barriers of time and space after 1840. What had taken months now required only minutes. Samuel Morse imposed his code of dots and dashes, the first standardization of binary language. Submarine cables, copper serpents laid on the ocean floor, connected Europe to America as early as 1866, creating the first global network of instantaneous communication.

The adoption of universal time in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference in Washington perfectly illustrated how technology reshaped our perception of the world. The 24 time zones imposed an unprecedented temporal discipline on humanity. The entire world set its watches to Greenwich, subject to the gentle tyranny of synchronized clocks.

The final decades of the 19^th century saw companies grow into bureaucratic behemoths. Banks, insurance companies, and department stores collapsed beneath registers and files. The 1890 American census illustrated this problem: the federal administration took seven years to process the data from the previous census. Herman Hollerith, a brilliant young engineer, designed his electromagnetic tabulating machine. Thanks to it, the results of the 1890 census were available in only six weeks. His Tabulating Machine Company, founded in 1896, would later become IBM.

The Great War radically transformed the relationship with information technologies. In the shadow of the trenches, mathematicians and linguists broke enemy codes. In France, Lieutenant Georges Painvin deciphered the German ADFGVX code in 1918, thwarting the Spring Offensive and perhaps saving Paris. Ballistic calculations, necessary for long-range artillery like the German Paris-Geschütz, demanded unprecedented precision. The war had shown that victory belonged to those who mastered information.

The interwar period saw the birth of new work organization methods. Frederick Taylor dissected workers' movements with a stopwatch while Henry Ford imposed his assembly line. The office followed the factory in this race toward rationalization. Burroughs accounting machines, National cash registers, Monroe calculators invaded administrations. The noise of keys, the chime of totals, the sliding of carriages now punctuated the daily life of white-collar workers.

The 1920s saw the explosion of telecommunications. Wireless telegraphy (TSF) carried voices and music into every home. The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) broadcast its first regular programs in 1922, followed by numerous stations around the world. The telephone, Graham Bell's 1876 invention, left behind its status as a gadget for the wealthy and began its conquest of households. Switchboard operators, predominantly women, became the first human interfaces between machines and their users, a striking metaphor for future human-machine relationships.

Social transformations accompanied these technological developments, and mass literacy changed the relationship with knowledge. In France, the Jules Ferry laws of 1881-1882 imposed compulsory education. In the United States, the literacy rate exceeded 80% as early as 1870. This educated population demanded ever more books, newspapers, and information. Knowledge became a commodity that now circulated at the speed of electricity.

Galloping urbanization created unprecedented organizational challenges. Paris grew from 500,000 to 3 million inhabitants between 1800 and 1930. New York exploded from 60,000 to 7 million souls during this period. These sprawling metropolises demanded colossal infrastructure. Baron Haussmann redesigned Paris, imposing his straight avenues on the old medieval quarters. In New York, engineer John Augustus Roebling threw his suspension bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn in 1883. These technical feats required diabolically precise calculations and methodical resource management.

The world of work metamorphosed under these intersecting influences. The tertiary sector swelled to dominate the American economy by the 1920s. Information workers—accountants, stenographers, operators—formed a new social class. Women flooded into these professions, altering gender relations in society. The typist, bent over her Remington, became an emblematic figure of this bureaucratic modernity.

In 1929, on the eve of the stock market crash that would shake the global economy, computing remained officially unborn. Yet all the ingredients for its future explosion were assembled. The need for calculation intensified in every field. The necessary mathematical theories had matured. Nascent electronics promised extraordinary performance. The ground was ready for the advent of programmable calculators that would soon transform the world more radically than the steam engine had done a century earlier.