How it began
In Lyon in 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated a loom that enabled unskilled workers to weave complex patterns in silk. He patented the machine in 1804. It built on earlier inventions by other Frenchmen: Basile Bouchon, who in 1725 applied a perforated band of paper to the draw loom, Jean-Baptiste Falcon in 1728, and Jacques Vaucanson in 1740. Jacquard combined elements of these, using Falcon's individual pasteboard cards and a square prism in place of Vaucanson's perforated barrel.
Before it existed
Figured designs were traditionally made on a drawloom, where a second operator, the draw boy, raised the warp threads for the weaver. The work was slow and labor-intensive, and the complexity of the pattern was limited by practical factors. Improvements to the draw loom had been under way in Lyon for a long time.
How it works
The machine is fitted to a loom and controlled by a chain of punched cards laced together in a continuous sequence. Several rows of holes are punched in each card, and one complete card corresponds to one row of the design. The holes determine which cords of the warp are raised for each pass of the shuttle. Jacquard's machine had eight rows of needles and uprights where Vaucanson's had two, which increased its figuring capacity.
What changed first
The ability to store and automatically reproduce complex operations found wide application in textile manufacturing. The figuring shed could be drawn on every shot rather than once every four, which gave fabric a sharper outline. A silk portrait of Jacquard woven on such a loom in 1839 required 24,000 punched cards.
What lasted
The use of replaceable punched cards to control a sequence of operations is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware. Charles Babbage, who owned one of the woven portraits, described plans in 1837 to use punched cards to input programs and data into his Analytical Engine. Herman Hollerith later used punched cards to tabulate the 1890 United States census. The term Jacquard now refers to the control mechanism that automates patterning rather than to any particular loom, and the process is also used for patterned knitwear and machine-knitted textiles.
