There are lots of reasons for being fascinated by history. Old-style teaching was once about kings, queens and ‘national heroes’ and new-style is often about the Horrible Histories approach, neither of which are appealing to me. The first is, at least for recent monarchs, just public relations for remote royalty. The latter is for teenagers who like squirmy stories.
My kind is the stuff I can relate to followed up by the bits that help me make sense of the first lot. So being from a textile family background, for example, and at the same time a frequent user of computers, the machinery in the Armley Mills Industrial Museum in Leeds strikes a chord. In 1801 a French inventor, Joseph Marie Jacquard, devised a weaving machine – a loom – which could produce complex designs. Punched cards were used to control how the warp and weft threads appeared in a cloth. This enabled the different colours of the front-to-back and the left-to-right threads to show in different combinations. Jacquard’s invention helped expand both the textile industry and the associated fashion trade. A hundred years later the firm which became IBM was able to speed up the United States’ census analysis by using punched cards – not for control but to represent different results which could then be sorted mechanically. Punched cards were later used in computers to feed instructions and data in to processing units – controlling the process. My first job after university was in a computer centre where thousands of such cards were used for engineering and other tasks.
So history, the story of human activity since the year dot, covers lots of interesting subjects. That is why millions of tourists enjoy, at one level or another, historic places. And for the tourism manager anxious to understand how this huge sector of the industry works, finding a path into the treasure house of history is the way to succeed.
My kind is the stuff I can relate to followed up by the bits that help me make sense of the first lot. So being from a textile family background, for example, and at the same time a frequent user of computers, the machinery in the Armley Mills Industrial Museum in Leeds strikes a chord. In 1801 a French inventor, Joseph Marie Jacquard, devised a weaving machine – a loom – which could produce complex designs. Punched cards were used to control how the warp and weft threads appeared in a cloth. This enabled the different colours of the front-to-back and the left-to-right threads to show in different combinations. Jacquard’s invention helped expand both the textile industry and the associated fashion trade. A hundred years later the firm which became IBM was able to speed up the United States’ census analysis by using punched cards – not for control but to represent different results which could then be sorted mechanically. Punched cards were later used in computers to feed instructions and data in to processing units – controlling the process. My first job after university was in a computer centre where thousands of such cards were used for engineering and other tasks.
So history, the story of human activity since the year dot, covers lots of interesting subjects. That is why millions of tourists enjoy, at one level or another, historic places. And for the tourism manager anxious to understand how this huge sector of the industry works, finding a path into the treasure house of history is the way to succeed.
