The model seen here is notably complex, even compared to other contemporary Jacquard looms. This Jacquard loom from the late nineteenth century is capable of managing 12,800 warp threads through the use of punch cards while a single worker manages the loom’s weft. The Regina Margherita, a 1895 thermal power plant that was used to power 1,800 looms in the silk workshop of Egidio and Pio Gavazzi in Desio, Italy. That was perhaps precisely the point of the display, as now each of these information machines share the same space: the former monastery of San Vittore whose high ceilings and large chambers are seemingly just as suited to displaying the typically oversized industrial items in the museum’s collection as they were to facilitating monastic ritual. The machine is entirely mechanical, but looking at those punch cards, it was hard to avoid drawing a line to the 1960s computer nearby, and then to the prehensile robot.
Right next to the robot display is a hulking Jacquard loom, a room-filling late nineteenth-century contraption capable, with the collaboration of a single human worker, of producing complex textile patterns through an automated process enabled by cards punched with holes that correspond to different mechanical actions. The robot watched as I half-heartedly waved my arms at it it merely shrugged (I later saw it engaged in a merry jig opposite an animated toddler). Behind a long panel of glass, there’s a dangling many-armed robot capable of learning from the movements of the visitors who stop to ogle it. A behemoth early computer holds court nearby. There is a massive 1895 steam engine named the Regina Margherita and a recreation of an alchemical pharmacy interior. On the ground floor of Milan’s Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia is a parade of collection highlights. All photographs are by the author, except where otherwise specified. Sarah Rovang is the 2017 recipient of the H.
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