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Invention

The Jacquard Loom

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Textile Engineering

The Jacquard loom is a mechanical loom that uses a chain of punched cards to control which warp threads are raised for each pass of the shuttle, automating the weaving of intricate patterned fabric that had previously required a draw boy or draw girl to lift threads by hand, and giving industrial machinery its first working example of a program read from a removable, reusable medium. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
Patent or First-Use Date
1804-01-01 1
Jacquard demonstrated the mechanism in 1801; the loom itself was patented in 1804-05.
Year
1804 1
Significance
The Jacquard loom's punched-card control is the acknowledged ancestor of programmable computing: Charles Babbage adapted the same punched-card principle to feed instructions and data into the Analytical Engine, and Herman Hollerith's tabulating machines carried punched cards into twentieth-century data processing. 1
Connections

Associated With

Textile Engineering, Fields

In Field

Textile Engineering, Fields

Invented By

Joseph Marie Jacquard, Engineers
Source Joseph Marie Jacquard (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Predecessor Of

The Analytical Engine, Inventions

Charles Babbage explicitly modeled the Analytical Engine's punched-card input on Jacquard's loom.

Source Jacquard Machine (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
In the Other Atlases

Influenced

Charles Babbage

Also in Computing Atlas: which this subject influenced.

Sources
1. Jacquard Machine (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia Foundation
  • History section
    Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated the mechanism in 1801 and patented it in 1804-05.
  • Lead section
    The Jacquard machine is a device fitted to a loom that simplifies the process of manufacturing textiles with such complex patterns as brocade, damask and matelassé.
  • Predecessor Of: The Analytical Engine
  • In Group: Weaving Machinery, lead
View the Source
Joseph Marie Jacquard (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationInvented By: Joseph Marie Jacquard, History section
Quote, Invented By: Joseph Marie Jacquard, History section
The loom was declared public property in 1805, and Jacquard was rewarded with a pension and a royalty on each machine.
View the Source

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