The problem of patterned cloth
Plain cloth is simple: the weft passes over one warp thread, under the next, and so on. Patterned cloth is not. In figured silk, such as brocade or damask, each pass of the weft may need to go over a different set of warp threads to form flowers, scrolls or other images. On traditional drawlooms this was handled by a helper, often called a drawboy, who sat at the loom and pulled cords in a set order to lift the right threads for each row. The work was slow, costly and error-prone, and a complex design could need thousands of rows.
Before Jacquard
Jacquard did not invent the idea from nothing. In 1725 Basile Bouchon, a textile worker in Lyon, France, used a roll of perforated paper to select which threads to lift. A few years later Jean-Baptiste Falcon replaced the roll with a chain of stiff punched cards, which were easier to change. The famous engineer Jacques de Vaucanson later designed a loom with automatic features, using a cylinder with pins. These machines were not widely adopted, partly because they were hard to make and maintain.
Joseph Marie Jacquard’s loom
Joseph Marie Jacquard, a Lyon weaver and inventor, combined and improved the earlier ideas. He showed a device in 1801 and received a patent in 1804, and in 1805 the French authorities took an interest in it. The Jacquard mechanism was a mounted attachment that sat above an ordinary loom.
The principle worked like this:
- Each warp thread (or small group of threads) was connected to a hook through a cord and a weight.
- A set of horizontal needles, one for each hook, were pushed against a card.
- Where the card had a hole, the needle passed through and its hook stayed in place. Where there was no hole, the needle was pushed back and its hook was moved out of position.
- A lifting frame raised the hooks that were still in place, which lifted the matching warp threads. The shuttle then passed beneath them.
- The card was advanced to the next in the chain, and the process repeated for the next row.
So each card was effectively one row of the design, and the full chain of cards stored the entire pattern. Changing the cards changed the pattern without altering the loom. A woven portrait of Jacquard, produced in the 1830s on a loom using many thousands of cards, is often cited as a display of what the mechanism could do. Exact card counts quoted for it vary, so treat them cautiously.
Reaction and spread
As with other labor-saving machines, the loom met resistance. Weavers in Lyon feared lost work, and there are reports that early devices were attacked. Over time, however, the loom spread through France and into Britain and elsewhere, particularly in silk, and later in wool, cotton and carpet weaving. The Jacquard head could be fitted to hand looms and later to power looms, so it combined easily with other advances. Lyon’s silk workers, known as canuts, rose in major revolts in 1831 and 1834, but these concerned pay and conditions, not just the machine itself.
Why it matters to computing
The connection to computers is real but often exaggerated. The Jacquard loom is a notable early example of a machine whose behavior is controlled by information stored on a separate, changeable medium. The holes were a binary choice: present or absent.
- Charles Babbage, the English mathematician, planned his Analytical Engine in the 1830s with punched cards to supply instructions and numbers, openly borrowing the idea from the Jacquard loom. The engine was never completed, and Babbage’s earlier designs for mechanical calculators did not use cards.
- Ada Lovelace, in her 1843 notes on the engine, wrote that it “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” Her work is often discussed in connection with the idea of programming.
- Herman Hollerith used punched cards to tabulate the 1890 United States census, and his company’s methods contributed to the business machine industry.
Punched cards went on to be used for data entry and storage in many of the first computers and in office equipment, and they remained common into the 1970s. The Jacquard loom did not directly cause these developments, and the cards in each case served different purposes, but it was a clear, successful precedent that engineers pointed to.
A lasting weaving tool
Back in the textile world, the Jacquard principle never disappeared. Mechanical cards were eventually replaced in many mills by electronic control, in which a computer file sets which threads are raised, but the loom’s logic is the same. Today the term “jacquard” is also used for a whole class of woven or knitted fabrics with intricate figured designs.