Jacquard Patents His First Loom
On 23 December 1800 Joseph Marie Jacquard set out to revolutionise weaving – and took his first step towards greatness.
When the computer pioneer Charles Babbage received guests, he liked to show them a framed portrait of the French weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard seated beside a model of his loom. ‘Oh, that engraving?’ the duke of Wellington asked when his attention was drawn to it.
But it wasn’t an engraving. It was a sheet of finely woven silk – a thousand threads to the inch – so subtle and detailed that it deceived many who saw it. It also held the secret to Babbage’s analytical engine: Jacquard’s right hand rests on a stack of punch cards, which controlled the loom’s operation.
Jacquard was born in Lyon in 1752 into a family of silk weavers. It was the city’s principal trade, involving some 40 per cent of the workforce. He patented his first loom on 23 December 1800. Punch cards were a later innovation, elaborated from the work of an earlier weaver, Jean Baptiste Falcon. Jacquard’s card-driven loom was operational by April 1805 when Napoleon made it public property. Thereafter, all of the emperor’s ceremonial clothes were woven using Jacquard’s process.
The possibilities were endless. Jacquard’s portrait required 24,000 individual cards, each with 1,050 hole positions, for example. The complexity was an avatar of the modern world. So was the speed. Weaving had been a two-person job; Jacquard’s loom only needed one and worked 24 times faster. Lyon’s weavers were so unhappy it is said they threw Jacquard into one of the city’s rivers.
Babbage had spent the 1820s working on a cogwheel-based calculating machine, known as a difference engine. When he became aware of Jacquard’s work, he saw its potential immediately. ‘The system of cards which Jacquard invented are the means by which we can communicate to a very ordinary loom orders to weave any pattern that may be desired’, he wrote to a friend. ‘Availing myself of the same beautiful invention I have by similar means communicated to my Calculating Engine orders to calculate any formula however complicated.’
Fellow pioneer Ada Lovelace put it more elegantly: ‘We may say ... that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.’
