This is a riff on a Matthew Lyons article in History Today.
When English polymath 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 he saw it. It wasn’t an engraving, but 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 that controlled the loom’s operation.
(For those of you children who don’t know what “punch cards” are/were, the world of computation could not have gotten this far without them, and some niche systems still use them for data entry.)
Jacquard was born in Lyon on 7 July 1752 into a family engaged in the city’s principal trade, which involved some 40% of the workforce: silk weaving. Although his father was a man of property, Jacquard received no formal schooling and remained illiterate until he was 13, when his printer/bookseller brother-in-law finally taught him. He may have worked at many trades other than weaving; though his work history until the early 19th Century is murky, his later record as an inventor supports this. Weaving—silk or any other textile—was an arduous, physically demanding trade before both automation and steam power transformed the industry in the 19th Century, and Jacquard was apparently not physically capable of operating the looms of his early life.
Jacquard’s early inventions were unsuccessful.
He invented a treadle loom in 1800 and a loom to weave fishing nets in 1803, neither commercially viable. Starting in 1804, he began on the loom named for him to weave patterned silk automatically. Based on the work of an earlier weaver, Jean Baptiste Falcon, the possibilities of Jacquard’s device were endless and its potential immediately recognized. On 12 April 1805, Emperor Napoleon and Empress Josephine visited Lyon and viewed Jacquard’s new loom. On 15 April 1805, the emperor granted the patent for Jacquard’s loom to the city of Lyon. After that, Jacquard’s process was used to weave all the Emperor’s ceremonial clothes. In return, Jacquard received a lifelong pension of 3,000 francs. Jacquard received a royalty of 50 francs for each loom that was bought and used between 1805 and 1811.
Simplicity, Speed, and Complexity
The complexity and speed of the loom were avatars of the modern world. Weaving had been a two-person job; Jacquard’s loom only needed one operator and worked 24 times faster. The portrait Babbage later displayed required 24,000 individual cards, each with 1,050 hole positions, a level of sophistication that might have required a year for another loom to produce, but that Jacquard’s loom made in two weeks.
Adaptations
Babbage had spent the 1820s working on a cogwheel-based calculating machine, known as the Difference Engine. When he learned 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…Availing myself of the same beautiful invention I have by similar means communicated to my Calculating Engine orders to calculate any formula however complicated.
Charles Babbage
Although Babbage receives credit for using such data entry means in computing machines, no evidence shows that he ever built one.
‘We may say ... that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.’
Ada Lovelace
Lovelace, who worked with Babbage, gets credit for having written the first computer programs which, like Babbage’s engine, never took physical form. Herman Hollerith took the Jacquard idea a step further, developing the “modern” punch card for the 1890 US census, forever wedding his name to the simple means that would endure as a mainstay of computing until the 1980s.
Not a terrible legacy for a silk weaver from Lyons.
The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan
Inventors often start out with one vision, just to see it used for something else entirely. By 1945, Wilbur Wright was still alive when the great-grandchildren of his invention laid waste to a country.
And Finally...
On 12 September:
490 BC: The conventional date for the Battle of Marathon between the forces of Athens and Platea and the Persian Empire in Attic Greece. After a one-sided battle where only a fraction of the Persian forces could engage, the Greeks pushed their enemies back to their ships, sinking several. According to legend, a Greek left for Sparta after the battle, running the entire 140 miles, giving the long-distance event its 19th Century name. (The modern marathon event is only 26 miles).
1933: While walking along London’s Southampton Row, Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd conceived of the nuclear chain reaction while waiting for a red light to change. Szilárd had recently read a newspaper article detailing English physicist Ernest Rutherford’s dismissal of atomic energy as “moonshine.” Both would work on atomic energy and nuclear weapons.
And today is FEMALE POLICE OFFICER DAY, commemorating this day in 1910 when Alice Stebbins Wells was sworn into the Los Angeles Police Department and became the first female police officer in the US. Five years later, sixteen other cities and several countries had women serving in their police departments, working almost exclusively with women and children in police custody.
In 1965 I took my first course in computer programming, using punch cards.
I hate punch cards.