Punched Card
During the eighteenth century, the demand for fine woven and patterned fabrics increased dramatically; while weaving was facilitated by the rising use of mechanical spinners and looms, there seemed to be no suitable method for simulating the hand-lifting of individual warp threads that was involved in patterning. In order to mechanize this process, two requirements had to be met: a memory medium in which to store the desired pattern, and a system for lifting the appropriate threads.
In 1725, French inventor Basile Bouchon constructed a device that used hooks and needles to lift the warp threads. The pattern was stored as a series of holes punched into a long sheet of paper; as the fabric was woven, the holes would allow certain hooks to pass through and lift the pattern threads. To change the pattern, one had only to change the paper sheet. (This system closely resembled that of a player piano.) While Bouchon's apparatus was very clever it was also very small, and thus found little application in the textile industry. The hook-and-paper system was improved upon by another Frenchman, named Falcon, who in 1728 replaced the sheet of paper with a series of punched cards, each one controlling a single hook or needle. This design allowed for much larger patterns to be woven but required two men to operate.
It was not until 1801 that a practical punched-card loom was constructed by Joseph-Marie Jacquard. His device--whose design was essentially a combination of Falcon's, Bouchon's, and Jacques de Vaucanson's--employed a foot pedal to allow a single weaver to create patterned textiles. Some improvements were made in 1845, and the device was quickly adapted to fit power looms.
One man impressed by the success of punched cards was the British scientist Charles Babbage. He envisioned an adding machine (which he called the "analytical engine") that could perform many simultaneous calculations and print the result onto a long tape of punched paper. While Babbage received government funding in 1823 to build his machine, the technology of the time was not sophisticated enough to match his design, and the project was never completed. Almost seventy years later American inventorHerman Hollerith succeeded in constructing a punched-card machine to calculate the results of the 1890 census; in 1896 Hollerith opened his own business, the Tabulation Machine Company, which, in 1924, became International Business Machines (IBM). Using punched cards as their principal storage medium, IBM led the way in the development of computers, eventually becoming the leading computer manufacturer in the world.
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