Joseph Marie Jacquard

Joseph Marie Jacquard was a French weaver and merchant who tried his hand as a plasterer, a cutler, a type founder and a soldier before returning to his father's trade and experimenting with automatic looms. In 1801 he exhibited a loom that used a chain of punched cards to control which warp threads were raised for each pass of the shuttle, letting an unskilled operator weave intricate patterned silk that had previously required a draw boy or draw girl to lift threads by hand. Lyon's silk weavers, fearing the labor-saving machine would cost them their livelihoods, burned examples of it and attacked Jacquard himself, but by 1812 some 11,000 Jacquard looms were working in France. The state declared the design public property in 1805 and rewarded Jacquard with a pension and a royalty on every machine sold. Charles Babbage later modeled the punched-card input of his own Analytical Engine directly on Jacquard's loom, making it a foundational precedent for programmable computing.