Joseph Marie Jacquard
1752-1834
French Inventor
Joseph Jacquard is the inventor of the weaving loom that still bears his name. The Jacquard loom revolutionized the textile industry and is the basis for the modern automatic loom.
Little is known about the formative years and education of Joseph Marie Jacquard. He spent the first years of his professional life as an apprentice in bookbinding, type-founding, and cutlery shops. It is believed that his parents had some connection to the weaving industry. Upon their deaths Jacquard inherited a small piece of property, which afforded him the opportunity to leave his apprenticeship and begin a series of experiments with weaves that contained patternsand designs. Unsuccessful, he lost his inheritance and was forced to return to type-founding and cutlery work.
Jacquard did not completely abandon his dreams and in 1790 he conceived of the idea for his famous loom, but his work was cut short by the onset of the French Revolution. The war lasted until 1793, during which time Jacquard fought on the side of the Revolutionaries in the defense of his hometown, Lyon.
In 1801 Jacquard introduced a loom for weaving net that was an improved version of work done by three previous loom inventors. He was sent to Paris to demonstrate it, where he received a bronze medal from the French government as well as a patent for this first invention. Along with the honor came a small pension that allowed Jacquard to study at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, where in 1804-1805 he perfected a mechanism for pattern weaving.
The mechanism, known as the Jacquard loom or the Jacquard attachment, was incorporated into special looms to control individual yarns. The device utilized interchangeable punched cards that controlled the weaving of the cloth so that any desired pattern could be created automatically. It enabled looms to produce fabrics with intricate woven patterns such as tapestry, brocade, and damask, and it was later adapted to the production of patterned knitted fabrics.
Using the Jacquard attachment, a given pattern is made of a predetermined series of threads that are either raised or not raised according to the holes on the punched cards. As a punched card moves into place on the loom, the weaving needles pass through the holes in the card and specific threads are raised to make a section of the desired pattern. Where there are no holes, the needles are simply pushed back off the card and no threads are raised. By adding several Jacquard attachments to one loom, a weaver can produce patterns that are both very intricate and of considerable size.
In 1806 the Jacquard loom was declared public property, and Jacquard was given a pension and royalty on each machine. But his invention was not well received by weavers, who feared that its labor-saving capabilities would take away their jobs. Weavers in Lyon burned machines and physically attacked Jacquard in protest. Eventually, the advantages of the Jacquard loom brought about its general acceptance, and by 1812 there were 11,000 of them in use in France. Jacquard received a gold medal and the Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1819. By 1820 his invention had reached England, and then it was quickly spread to the rest of the world.
Jacquard's punched card system introduced the concept of storing information for controlling data processing in a machine. In 1834, the year of Jacquard's death, these punched cards were adopted by noted English inventor Charles Babbage (1792-1871) as an input-output medium for his proposed analytical engine, the first automatic digital computer. Similarly, in 1880 American statistician Herman Hollerith (1860-1929) developed a machine capable of reading and then sorting data represented by a pattern of holes punched in cards. Using Hollerith's machine, it took just six weeks to process the 1890 United States census results—one-third the time required in 1880. Jacquard's punched cards were also used as a means of inputting data into early digital computers, but they were eventually replaced by electronic devices.
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