History of Computers - Jacquard Loom

In 1801, Joseph Jacquard invented an automated loom that wove patterns corresponding to the punched cards that were its input. This was the first machine use of punched cards, and drastically improved the efficiency and the complexity of the weaving that was able to be done.

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Overview

Joseph Marie Jacquard was a French weaver and silk merchant born in 1752 to a master weaver of Lyon. In 1800, he began to dabble in various loom designs, inventing a loom for weaving fishing nets, a treadle (foot operated) loom, and eventually, in 1801, an automatic loom ^[1]. Called the 'Jacquard loom', it wove rows of cloth to correspond with rows on punched cards. The revolutionary design won Jacquard critical acclaim in Paris due to the obvious advantages in both the efficiency and the complexity of the weaving process. Despite dissent from the weavers who felt their jobs were being threatened by the new technology, an impressed emperor Napoleon commissioned hundreds to be built ^[2]. The term 'sabotage' comes from the efforts of the weavers to destroy the loom by throwing their 'sabot', or wooden shoes, in its direction.

Significance

The Jacquard loom is the first machine to accept input in the form of punched cards to control a sequence of operations. Although the loom requires no computation to be made, the ability to manipulate the output of the loom by punching different patterns into cards is an important predecessor to modern computing. Charles Babbage drew from the design of the Jacquard loom to build his Analytical Engine, which similarly accepted punched cards as input ^[3]. As late as the 1940's, when they were used to make computations for the Manhattan Project, punched cards were being used to convey inputs to machines, and although the machines themselves changed drastically, the method of input varied only slightly.