Hairdressers, Part Two: Personal Computers

       The Secret Life of Hairdressers continues with Part Two today. I'm not any more obsessed with hair than anyone else. Really. Once when we were living in Switzerland, the hairdresser touched my hair and exclaimed in delight about how thick and strong my hair was. This sounds nice, but actually it made me feel like a freak. I could tell she was using the "scientist" tone of voice, which is the mesmerized tone one uses when discovering something interesting. Like, say, a two-headed tadpole or some other mutant beast. A long time ago, in a land far away, I was also once a scientist so I recognized that tone of voice instantly.

        My suspicions were confirmed when she asked if she could take one of my hairs for "testing," reassuring me that it would only take a minute. I said yes. She was as excited as a puppy under a Christmas tree. She took the hair over to a device on the counter. She clamped the two ends of the hair so that it was held taut. There was a magnifying glass and ruler to measure the hair's diameter. The machine slowly and gently stretched the hair until the breaking point, just like a miniature medieval torture rack. She noted down all the data, then turned to me. Her forehead was shining with sweat, her eyes were agleam. She was breathless. "This," she whispered, "is the thickest, strongest hair I have ever measured." Then she asked if she could have another hair, as a souvenir. I said yes. I wondered what her hair collection looked like. My family also appreciates my hair. "Wire hair" they call it, with that affectionate, teasing tone of voice that family members use with each other. But I don't have a complex about my hair. Really.

Gaspard Riche, the Baron de Prony (1755-1839).
French mathematician and hairdresser recruiter.

       The MISPFRUH Award, for the Most Innovative Scheme for Post-French Revolution Unemployed Hairdressers, has to go to the French mathematician Gaspard Riche, also known as the Baron de Prony. He was in charge of calculating mathematical tables for a huge land survey, the Cadastre. The government was keen to have comprehensive tables, for they could be used not only for surveying (and thus taxation), but also for astronomy, engineering, and navigation. Prony was initially daunted by the task of calculating these tables (from the numbers 0 to 100,000 to nineteen decimal places, and the numbers from 100,000 to 200,000 to twenty-four decimal places). It was so immense that even all the mathematicians in France would not be able to complete it. What to do?

       In a flash of inspiration after reading about the idea of "the division of labour" in Adam Smith's book "The Wealth of Nations," Prony saw that the job of compiling these tables could be divided up into two separate tasks: mechanical calculation, which did not necessarily require any previous math background, and verification or supervision, which required the skills of mathematicians. If he could train enough workers to grind out the mechanical calculations, relatively few mathematicians would be necessary to carry out the verification and supervision roles, and the job would be done that much sooner. Where to recruit these workers?

Hairdressers, 

        After the French Revolution, fancy, aristocratic hairstyles (see previous post) were definitely out of fashion. This led to high unemployment among hairdressers, and that is where Prony decided to recruit his "computers". The hairdressers had hardly any knowledge of mathematics (many could only add and subtract), and did not have any special interest in science. However, Prony trained them to methodically and mechanically go through a series of calculating steps, on worksheets with a blank space to fill in at the end of each line. It reminds me of our tax forms, but probably Prony's worksheets were even simpler.

...plus Worksheets...

        The hairdressers could take the worksheets home, and when the work was done, they would bring them in to be checked by mathematicians. This is like the cottage industry of piecework sewing that can be completed at home and then brought in to a central location for inspection. In the book "When Computers Were Human," the author D.A. Grier says these trained computers were "little different from manual workers and could not discern whether they were computing trigonometric functions, logarithms, or the orbit of Halley's comet." This model of labour, armies of trained workers grinding out a product for higher ups, can be found today, not only in factories, but also in university graduate schools.

...equals Calculators...

...and Computers.
Babbage's Difference Engine #2, now at the Science Museum in London

       Charles Babbage (1791-1871) was an English inventor who taught himself algebra, became a Cambridge math professor, married for love, and invented the cowcatcher on the front of steam locomotives. He is probably best known now as the "father of the computer," for he realized that if Prony's hairdressers could churn out mathematical data, then a mechanical machine could do it too. He worked for years on designs for a "Difference Engine" that could calculate results to 31 digits, and on an "Analytical Engine" that could be programmed using punch cards. The next time you use your calculator or computer, thank your hairdresser!

Hairdressers

       One of my fellow woodworkers is a retired hairdresser. He's always in a good mood, and he's been very patient and helpful with my beginner questions. He's currently finishing up a planter for his garden, a square wooden box with knobs on the tops of the four corners, like the planters for orange and lemon trees at Versailles. Later this spring, he and his wife will take a trip to Vietnam. He's been to Thailand before, and thirty years ago, he even manage to go to Burma. I asked him what Burma was like. "Oh, it was interesting, but the people were so poor." He paused, then shook his head sadly. "And the food was terrible." Then he told me that he would really like to go to China one day, but not just for a week or two. His wife hasn't retired yet, so as soon as she does, he'll start planning a long trip in China.

        Doesn't it seem like he has a good life? Do retired hairdressers in the US and Canada also have the resources to travel abroad for weeks at a time?

Marie Antoinette

        I was at the Louvre recently, on a tour about women in the 18th century. Hairdressers back then did not have an easy job constructing the towering mountains of hair that adorned aristocratic women. Our guide told us that a sort of metal frame was worn on the head as the scaffold upon which to build a 1-3 foot tall superstructure of hair and ornaments. Guess what hairdressers used in the days before hairspray and gel to mold the hair into the desired shape? Butter!! UGH!!! They probably used vats of it too. At the end they powdered the whole thing in lots of flour and stuck in jewels or ornaments. It was all so elaborate that nobody washed their hair for weeks or months. Bathing any part of the body was not widely practiced at this time; even the king would only bathe once a year. Those butter and flour hairdos must have smelled good right after they were finished, but can you imagine the rancid stench after a few weeks or months? No wonder French people love perfume.

Salted or unsalted?

        Carrying a mound of butter, flour and hair around on the top of your head was not easy for daily activities like getting into carriages, or sleeping. The frames were constructed with a hinge so that upon getting into a carriage, a lady could gently unhinge the hair, bend it backwards, and thus enter the carriage without demolishing her precious hairdo on the frame of the carriage door. Once inside, sitting on the floor of the carriage, she could prop her hair up again. Sleeping was more problematic, as rodents had to be scared away from the tasty temptation of gnawing on all that stinky butter. Ladies who wanted to protect their hair slept semi-upright. There was a little table by their side and on that table there would be a container with morsels of cheese or other tasty food for mice and rats. This would prevent hungry rodents from crawling up to munch on one's hairdo while asleep. What an excellent precautionary measure.

"in Just-" in time for Spring

     The bulbs are out and leaf buds are popping. Here is a poem by one of my favorite poets, Edward Estlin Cummings, better known as e.e. cummings. He wrote a poem a day from age 8 to 22.

in Just-
by e.e. cummings

in Just-
spring       when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles      far       and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far        and         wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and

        the

                    goat-footed

balloonMan           whistles
far
and
wee

Musée Nissim de Camondo

       I learned today that if you are looking at fine furniture or art, and you are impressed with the craftsmanship but you don’t actually like it, you use the euphemism “beau travail,” literally “beautiful work.” Perhaps the object is not really your taste, perhaps the colours repel you, or perhaps you think the whole thing is downright ugly. If, on the other hand, you actually liked the object, you would simply sigh with a covetous gleam in your eye and say it was "beau,"  beautiful.

       The Camondo Museum is full of furniture and other art objects that are "beau travail" to me, although to someone who loves 18th century Louis XV and Louis XVI style, they will be marvelously "beau." The museum was the former home of the Camondo banking family. The Camondos were Sephardic Jews, chased from Spain during the Inquisition. They established a bank in Constantinople at the beginning of the 19th century, then moved to Paris in the 1870s. Monsieur Moïse Camondo built himself a mansion modeled on the Petit Trianon in Versailles, then filled it with 18th century decorative art treasures. Money, apparently, couldn't buy happiness, as his wife ran off with the manager of the family's stables, who also happened to be a dashing Italian count.

       The house is certainly impressive, and is near the lovely Parc Monceau.

Musee Camondo

The objets d'art inside are also impressive, although they will mostly appeal to people who go wild over gobs of gilt.

Why ruin a perfectly fine crackled celadon vase with all those gold curlicues?

        There are also many outstanding examples of fine marquetry furniture, where the inlaid wood veneer forms exquisite patterns. A huge amount of work goes into not only the marquetry design, but also the choice of wood for the veneer, the orientation of the wood grain, and the treatment of the wood to slightly char it, producing a 3D effect of shadowing. Here is a good example, a cabinet by the Maître Ebéniste (Master Cabinetmaker) Jean-Henri Riesener (1734-1806).

Riesener sliding door cabinet with floral marquetry

You can see the slats that make up the sliding doors. There are two small gold knobs in the middle of the bouquet. When you push the knobs apart, the doors slide into the body of the cabinet, hidden from view. This kind of slat-based sliding door design later came back with a vengeance, in 1970s TV consoles.

       Woodworking was not Riesener’s only skill, as the story of how he became a Maître Ebéniste shows. Riesener was an apprentice, then a journeyman with the great furniture maker Jean-François Oeben (1721-1763). Oeben actually had two journeymen, Riesener and Jean-François Leleu, who was more senior. If a Master died, it was assumed that the senior journeyman would take over the workshop. Therefore, when Oeben died, Leleu assumed that he was the rightful heir and that his future would be  bright and rosy. Riesener, however, had other ideas. Riesener and Leleu fought over the right to inherit Oeben’s mantle, and pounded each other in physical brawls that were noted in police reports of the time. Riesener eventually won by seducing Oeben’s widow and persuading her to marry him. He thus inherited Oeben’s workshop, became a Maître Ebéniste, and later became Marie Antoinette’s favourite cabinetmaker.

       One of the rooms I liked best at the Camondo museum was the kitchen, a large, light-filled space with a stunning collection of copper pots:

Kitchen of Musee Camondo

I also liked this austere but beautiful still life from the kitchen:

Meat grinder and friends 

        Just for the record, although my personal taste leans more towards Shaker style, I thoroughly enjoyed Coppola’s movie about Marie Antoinette. I guess it’s hard to make a fantasmagoric and luscious film about the Shakers.

       The Camondo family had a tragic end. Moïse Camondo’s only son Nissim was killed as a pilot in World War I. Devastated by his son’s death, Moïse willed his entire house and its contents to the state. His daughter Béatrice and her husband and children all perished at Auschwitz. 

Cherry wood

Cherry planks, the tall ones in the middle.

       The next project is a pair of end tables made of cherry wood. When the order of wood arrives, it looks exactly like a lengthwise slice of rough sawn tree. It comes with the bark and everything. What was I expecting, squared and planed perfect rectangles? I guess it's a bit like going to buy meat at the market and being surprised to see real chickens, with feathers and heads and feet.

       Here is what some of that cherry wood looks like after being made into squared and planed perfect rectangles for table legs:

Many hours of work later.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Japan. I keep checking the news to see whether or not nuclear catastrophe has occurred yet. Japan has been on my mind a lot in the past few days, as I have been reading David Mitchell’s book “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet”. It’s a wonderful book, a love story, an adventurous thriller, and a meditation on culture clash in the late 18^th century. Japan at this time was almost entirely closed to foreign influence, but limited trading with the Dutch East India Company was allowed as long as the foreigners, mostly Dutch, confined themselves to the artificial island of Dejima, near Nagasaki.  The hero Jacob de Zoet is an honest Dutch accountant brought to Dejima to help root out corruption. Along the way, Orito Aibagawa, a highly skilled but scarred midwife, literally barges into his life during a hilarious episode when she is chasing a thieving monkey that has made off with a corpse’s leg. This is a 500 page novel that draws you into a meticulously re-created lost world. There is a full cast of foreign and Japanese characters, including the sympathetic interpreter Uzaemon and the initially prickly, but good-hearted Dr. Marinus. Unbeknownst to everybody, the eery Lord Abbot Enomoto has sinister plans to kidnap Orito for dark rituals at his mysterious mountaintop shrine, rituals so evil that the monks and nuns have to be kept drugged to…well, read it and find out!

La Phonogalerie

Gramophones and stacks of records at La Phonogalerie, Paris.

I went on a guided tour this week of the "Phonogalerie", a centre for gramophones, records, and all things to do with the history of recorded sound. When you walk into Monsieur Aro's "Phonogalerie", a large light-filled showroom near Pigalle Metro, the first thing that strikes you is the sheer number of beautiful gramophones. The horns, the gramophone's most prominent part, are everywhere, attached to machines, stacked in piles, or encased in elaborate wooden cabinetry. They are mostly made of metal, but some are wood, and there is even a glass one. Some are large, flaring out like the petals of a petunia flower. Others are slim and streamlined, like tall pointy witch hats. One model, used at a World's Fair, did not have a horn, but instead, had many headphones attached. 

A wax cylinder gramophone with many headphones (white dangling tubes).

Monsieur Aro quizzed us: Who was the first person to invent a machine to record and play back sound? Everyone else on the guided tour was silent so of course I blurted out “Thomas Edison.” Wrong! It was not the American Edison, said M. Aro with a satisfied smile, but the Frenchman Charles Cros who was the first person to invent such a machine. Cros had written a note to the French Academy of Sciences, explaining the concept, but was so disappointed with the lack of interest that he then moved on to other projects. 

A glass horn. The beige cylinder to the lower right behind the horn is the wax cylinder used to record and reproduce sound.

           Edison was the first to patent his invention, and to make it commercially successful. We got to listen to music from the early 1900s recorded on a wax cylinder, before the invention of flat recording discs. We also heard music from the “Regina Hexaphone” jukebox (a nickel a song), and a song from a vinyl record played on a gramophone. All of us sighed that it brought back many happy childhood memories of listening to records.

Belleville

How I wish I had brought my camera with me today, it was so sunny, and the sky was so blue. I would have taken some photos of Belleville, Paris' old Chinatown in the 19th arrondissement, where I had lunch and bought groceries today after woodworking class. Bet you can’t guess what I had for lunch at the place with the cleverly obscure name, Restaurant Ravioli, at 47 rue de Belleville. The ravioli, or potstickers, are hand-made, including the wrappers, as I have walked by during off-hours and seen the workers sitting at a floury table, rolling out circles of dough at lightning speed, filling, sealing, done. Today I had tofu, shitake mushroom and chive ravioli, small, pan-fried and crispy on the bottom, tender and tasty with just enough chewiness everywhere else.

I couldn’t leave without getting some essential groceries: steamed pork buns, roast duck, and dried black beans. Black beans are amazingly difficult to find in Paris, and after looking around in many different areas of the city, in all kinds of gourmet, ethnic, and health food stores, I finally found some in Belleville, on the bottom shelf of a small display of beans in the basement of a very modest store on a side street near the Metro.

 Nobody in this town ever has change for bills bigger than 5 euros, so I’ve gotten into the habit of always trying to pay with exact change. I was at the checkout, painstakingly counting out my coins, when a young Asian woman rushed over, clutching a gingerroot and two boxes of strawberries. She seemed agitated, swayed side to side, and held her groceries tight against her body. She spoke in Mandarin and told the cashier her stomach really hurt, and could she please pay right after me, and before the next person, a middle-aged Caucasian man with a full grocery basket. The cashier considered her request, then replied in Mandarin that she should really ask the man, who was next in line. “But I don’t speak French!” said the young woman. The cashier turned to the man, asked in French if he would mind letting the young woman go first, and he said it was fine. As the cashier rang up the gingerroot and strawberries, she told the young woman: “I hope you understand why I said we had to ask him first. We have to be a little careful, we don’t want them accusing us of only looking after our own people!”

A Close Call on the 91 Bus

He was big, tall, with a hugely protruding belly, and he was so close I could smell his bad breath. I didn’t dare look up. I didn’t want to see his ugly mug. This is exactly the reason why Mister K prefers to walk or bike, instead of taking public transportation. I was musing about how to describe the unpleasant situation of being crammed into a packed bus, sharing air space with bulky individuals emanating noxious fumes.  Would I use the phrase “a miasma of stench”? Or would I use a different image, like “inhaling a cloud of germs from other people’s intimate parts”?

My purse was slung diagonally over my shoulder, hanging at my waist, and I felt a slight nudge there, faint as a whisper. I had the passing thought that nobody better be trying to pinch my bottom. The bus stopped, people got off, and some space opened up in the aisle near George. I moved to the aisle, towards George so we could be sure to exit together later, but there was a teenage girl standing in the way, chatting with her seated friend. I said “Pardon,” and was getting ready to move past her when all of a sudden the big fat guy lumbered into the aisle, pushed past me, separating the teenager from her friend, and then stopped right there, like a stolid elephant rooted to the spot. The teenager and I exchanged “some people are so rude” glances. In the meantime, other people had come onto the bus so I was now sandwiched between the fat guy and the invading mass of new passengers. Again, I felt a slight fleeting pressure near my waist, but it was so slight, we were wedged in so tightly, and I was busy thinking about how we had to get off at the next stop and I had to be sure to catch George’s eye so he wouldn’t forget to get off too. It was hard work wading through the crowd to get out, and as soon as I stepped off the bus, I looked down at my purse. The zipper was halfway undone, and I am absolutely 100% positive that it had been completely done up when we had gotten onto the bus. In that moment, looking at the zipper, I knew, I knew for certain, that the big fat guy had been trying to pickpocket me.

It explained everything, the odd microsecond nudges as he tried to push the zipper along, and his sudden febrile lunge into the aisle that ended so abruptly as soon as he was smack dab right next to me. Luckily, nothing was taken, my wallet was still there (too wide and bulky to lift out even with the zipper half undone), and no money was taken (wallet very deep, very little money in it, and the billfold area was stuffed full with junk like old receipts and coupons anyway). A happy ending!