Mechanizing Repetition: The Jacquard Loom
Work. The universal human experience. We work around our homes to keep them clean and well kept. We work outside our homes to earn money and provide for our financial needs. Work is often considered a necessary evil, a less than desirable aspect of life on planet Earth. Our work can be fun, but at times our work can be tedious. Although work is different for us today, before the Industrial Revolution nearly every aspect of work was for pure survival. Many kinds of work provided luxury for the higher classes of society. For the lower classes, providing these luxuries was incredibly tiresome and tedious, then came technology. Technology has always sought to reduce work and increase leisure for all. The distance between higher and lower classes began to shrink with each new technological development. But that’s after the tech, let’s back up to the time before the technology.
For thousands of years, woven tapestries have been the height of luxury and wealth spurred by their extremely difficult and time consuming production. The loom has been the tool used to create intricate patterns of rugs, wall decorations, bed coverings, and more for thousands of years. However, the loom was also tedious to operate and required two people for its operation (Geselowitz, “The Jacquard Loom…”). A skilled weaver operated the loom from the front moving the weft thread between the warps (the threads running up and down) (Geselowitz, “The Jacquard Loom…”). In order to move the weft between the warps, specific threads of the warps needed to be raised or lowered. The way that each thread was moved determined the final pattern. A second operator was needed, a draw boy, who sat on top of the loom and lifted the threads as directed by the weaver (Geselowitz, “The Jacquard Loom…”).
Although this process could create beautiful designs and patterns, the process was intensely tedious and each piece would take extraordinary amounts of time. The system of lifting warps by a draw boy was also prone to error. In addition, if the weaver wished to produce the same design again, difficult detail was required and mass production was nearly impossible on any amount of scale…until 1801 (Garfinkel and Grunspan 40).
Joseph-Marie Jacquard was born into a family of weavers, naturally he became one himself (Garfinkel and Grunspan 40).
Jacquard’s familiarity with the loom and weaving also meant that he was quite familiar with the trugery of the art. He knew he could invent a better solution (Garfinkel and Grunspan 40). He studied the careful repetitive nature of weaving and realized it could be carried out via mechanical means. The Jacquard Loom was born.
First demonstrated in 1801, the Jacquard Loom revolutionized the world of weaving.
At the time, this was a groundbreaking change. The loom worked by automating the raising and lowering of the warp threads, thereby producing the pattern without any input from the operator, the draw boy was eliminated completely (“The story of the…”). The Jacquard Loom “made it possible for complex and detailed patterns to be manufactured by unskilled workers in a fraction of the time” that a skilled weaver could (“The story of the…”). Additionally, patterns could now be reproduced over and over, mass production was made possible for the first time.
The Jacquard Loom was a brilliant piece of engineering that used punched cards to record, and repeat, the woven pattern (Garfinkel and Grunspan 40). A master weaver would begin by designing the desired pattern on a paper covered in squares (similar to grid paper) (“The story of the…”). A skilled card maker would then take the design and punch holes into cards wherever a square was colored. Each row of holes (or squares on the paper) would be one row of the tapestrie. Where there is a hole, the thread, or warp, would be lifted. Where there is no hole, the thread would remain where it was (The Henry Ford, “How an 1803…”). After the cards were punched, they were then threaded together into a long belt that was fed into the Jacquard Loom.
On the top of the loom, the Jacquard mechanism worked the warp threads. The belt was fed into the mechanism and with each cycle of the loom a matrix of pins pressed against the card. If a pin went through a hole in the card, it would engage a hook that would lift the warp thread and allow the shuttle to travel under the raised threads and over the lowered threads, completing the weave (Garfinkel and Grunspan 40).
Costs fell dramatically as unskilled workers could now produce complex patterns at speeds never before possible. Multiple looms could be managed by one master weaver. As was common throughout the Industrial Revolution, many workers opposed the Jacquard Loom and fought against its implementation (Geselowitz, “The Jacquard Loom…”). In the 1820s, a group of textile workers killed textile factory owners and smashed Jacquard Looms as part of the Luddite movement (Geselowitz, “The Jacquard Loom…”). However, the benefits provided by the new device simply could not be destroyed and the loom became a standard piece of textile manufacturing.
What was once a painstaking process could now be accomplished in a fraction of the time.
Complex designs that may only have been able to be produced once, could now be produced repeatedly, by storing and reusing the punch card belts. In fact, revival textile weavers were sometimes caught stealing the card chains, now considered an early version of software piracy. Stealing the belts allowed other factories to make competitors’ proprietary designs (da Cruz, “The Jacquard Loom.”).
The Jacquard Loom is perhaps the most influential piece in the early history of computers.
It wasn’t the loom itself that provided a lasting legacy, but the punch cards it used to store the designs (Geselowitz, “The Jacquard Loom…”). The punched cards proved to be an early method of binary number storage. A hole could be equivalent to a binary 1, no hole could be equivalent to a binary 0 (Revisit my earlier piece on the development of binary for a more thorough review.) (Garfinkel and Grunspan 40).
Joseph Marie Jacquard stumbled upon a way to store data, much more data than textile patterns.
In 1837, early computer scientist and British mathematician, Charles Babbage, dreamed up a device, the Analytical Engine, which would become the first general purpose computer ever created. He saw the Jacquard Loom and realized that the punched cards provided an excellent input and output method for his new invention (Geselowitz, “The Jacquard Loom…”). Using punched cards, Babbage invented a system that quickly entered numbers, in their binary form, into his computer and provided an output by punching holes in blank cards.
Lady Ada Lovelace was delighted when she saw the system remarking,
“the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves” (“The story of the…”).
Lady Lovelace even took the concept further, envisioning a future in which cards could be used to control computers, conceptualizing computer programming for the first time (“The story of the…”).
Although Babbage and Lovelace’s vision took another 100 years to be fully realized, the card method of data storage was a stroke of genius for the computing industry. Eventually, nearly every computer used this system of data input/output. Engineer Herman Hollerith eventually patented a system to read data from punched cards and applied it to the 1890 United States Census (Geselowitz, “The Jacquard Loom…”).
IBM computers made extensive use of punch cards, and many today still remember punch card computers used through the 1970s.
Although punch cards are no longer used for computer storage, the technology still survives in many practical ways today. Many standardized tests, such as the SATs, ACTs, and AP tests, use circles that test takers fill in with a №2 pencil. Some elections use ballots that require voters to punch out holes next to their choices. New computers quickly read these results and process the information. Given these uses, it’s doubtful Jacquard’s 19th century system will slip from popular use any time soon.
The Jacquard Loom is an antiquated device, but with it came a system that revolutionized the world of data storage.
For the first time, mechanical computation became more…well…mechanical and much less manual. Jacquard invented a system that provided a method of computerized storage and programming for hundreds of years. The Jacquard Loom is the thirteenth major milestone in the history of computing.
More on Early Computer Programming:
More on the History of Computers:
Works Cited
“1801: Punched Cards Control Jacquard Loom.” 1801: Punched Cards Control Jacquard Loom | The Storage Engine | Computer History Museum, www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/punched-cards-control-jacquard-loom/.
da Cruz, Frank. “The Jacquard Loom.” The Jacquard Loom, 29 May 2019, www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/jacquard.html.
“A Jacquard loom in action.” YouTube, uploaded by NationalMuseumsScotland, 11 July 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlJns3fPItE.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Jacquard Loom.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 7 Feb. 2017, www.britannica.com/technology/Jacquard-loom.
“How an 1803 Jacquard Loom Led to Computer Technology.” YouTube, uploaded by The Henry Ford, 27 July 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQzpLLhN0fY.
Geselowitz, Michael N. “The Jacquard Loom: A Driver of the Industrial Revolution.” IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, 2019, spectrum.ieee.org/the-institute/ieee-history/the-jacquard-loom-a-driver-of-the-industrial-revolution.
Laskow, Sarah. “Before Computers, People Programmed Looms.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 16 Sept. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/before-computers-people-programmed-looms/380163/.
“Programming Patterns: the Story of the Jacquard Loom.” Science and Industry Museum, www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/jacquard-loom.
Science and Technology 2 min read. “Jacquard Loom.” National Museums Scotland, www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/science-and-technology/jacquard-loom/.
“Jacquard Design Machine Simulation 3D.” YouTube, uploaded by Sharan Ajith, 10 July 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awGjOGo_Mis.
“How was it Made? Jacquard weaving.” YouTube, uploaded by Victoria and Albert Museum, 8 Oct. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6NgMNvK52A.
