Jacquard Loom
A weaving loom that read its patterns from chains of punched cards, the first widely used machine controlled by a stored program.
In 1804 Joseph Marie Jacquard, working in Lyon, France, demonstrated a loom attachment that selected warp threads using a chain of punched cards. Each card row held a pattern for one pass of the shuttle. A weaver no longer needed a helper to lift threads by hand.
Earlier French inventors, including Basile Bouchon, Jean-Baptiste Falcon and Jacques de Vaucanson, had built card, tape or drum controlled looms. Jacquard combined their ideas into a design that worked reliably, and Lyon's silk industry adopted it within a few years.
Why it matters
Jacquard looms showed that a machine could follow instructions stored on cards and change its output by swapping the cards. Charles Babbage used the same idea for his Analytical Engine, and Herman Hollerith used punched cards for the 1890 US census. IBM card equipment carried the format into the computer age.
Key facts
- Patented in France in 1804 and used widely in Lyon by about 1812.
- Each hole in a card either let a hook rise or blocked it, which is a binary choice.
- Weavers produced a woven portrait of Jacquard in 1839 using about 24,000 cards.
- Babbage owned a copy of that portrait and showed it to visitors.
Sources
- Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and William Aspray, et al. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. 3rd ed. Westview Press, 2013.
- Essinger, James. Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age. Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Science Museum Group Collection, "Jacquard loom" object records.