Weaving by punched card began in 1801 with Joseph Marie Jacquard’s remarkable innovation: a loom capable of following a sequence of holes punched into stiff cards to automate complex textile patterns. This breakthrough transformed weaving from a fully manual craft into a programmable process. Jacquard’s system showed how information could control machinery — a concept that echoed far beyond the textile industry.
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There are three roads to ruin; women, gambling and technicians.
The most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling,
but the surest is with technicians. Georges Pompidou
In medieval times Europeans were clothing themselves in leather, linen and wool. Using leather and fleeces as clothing became a simple tailoring task, but the linen from flax and the wool from sheep had first to be processed into cloth; spun into a yarn, then knitted or woven to produce the textile.
Consequently, textiles moved from being a cottage industry, during the industrial revolution, and factory made. Furthermore, a whole slew of inventions became applied to speed up the looms and progressively minimised manual tasks of the operator. Jacquard’s weaving by punched card became a significant step in this.
| ASIDE: Amusingly when cotton first appeared in Europe it provoked some confusion as to its origin. Its similarity to wool led John Mandeville to state in 1850, ‘There grew in India a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungry.’ The German word for cotton is baumwolle – literally ‘tree wool’. |
Automation
Jacquard’s weaving by punched card, one of many developments from this time. You can learn more about Jacquard’s Loom at Wikipedia – here. This development led towards computing – as an example see this page about Charles Babbage.
Jacques de Vaucanson started out as a clockmaker in Grenoble, the clock pictured (above) was designed for Fortnum & Mason.
With the support of a local nobleman he started to build automatons. These included androids capable of serving dinner and clearing the table after a meal.
Furthermore, he produced a shepherd that played the flute and tabor with a repertoire of twelve songs.
But, the Digesting Duck, perhaps his most famous automaton, designed and built as an entertaining demonstration to raise funds to enable him to pursue his automaton work.
Made from copper and with 4,000 mechanical parts, the duck drank water and ate grain digested it and voided; it could also move, wag its tail, flap its wings and quack. Some suggest the eating and defaecating was something of a fraud and that it would ingest the food into one container and eject faeces that had been prepared earlier!
1741 De Vaucanson reviewed the silk making process in France, because it had fallen behind that of England and Scotland.
He drew on developments made by Basile Bouchon and Jean Falcon to create the first automated loom. Bouchon had investigated the use of punched cards in 1725 and Falcon had increased the number of warp threads that could be managed but much of this progress was overlooked during the French Revolution.
Automated looms
It was not until the Jacquard Loom, first displayed in 1801, that the weaving by punched card became effective. Rows of holes defined the complex weaving requirements for materials such as brocades and damasks. Each hole drove a hook that located the warp threads for the weft threads to pass above or below them.
Napoleon placed large orders for silk in 1802 in an effort to encourage the ailing industry, it moved to adopt the Jacquard loom from 1805. He and Josephine saw it in Lyons and granted Joseph-Marie Jacquard a patent for the invention whereby he earned fifty francs royalty from each loom built over the next six years.
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