Jaquard Cards
A set of Jaquard punch cards, from the Nishijin textile district, Kyoto, Japan. These cards controlled a “Jacquard machine,” a device attached to a weaving loom that greatly simplifies textile production. But Jaquard cards are more than that. They represent the first binary programming language, and as such, have had a huge impact on the evolution of computing. But let’s begin at the beginning.
To create fabric, you generally need a loom, a device that holds a set of vertical fibers (the warp). Another set of fibers (the weft), is then woven through the warp, carried by a device called a shuttle. If you want to add some kind of pattern to your fabric, you’ll need to vary the way the weft fibers are inerlaced with the warp (as well as their color, texture, etc.) This is done by mechanically raising and lowering frames holding sections of the warp, while the shuttle carries the weft through them. It gets complicated pretty fast!
Historically, commercial textile production was extremely labor-intensive. For this reason, cloth with woven patterns was a luxury for the few. Beginnining in the early 18th century, several French inventors began experimenting with ways to mechanize weaving. It was a two part-problem: they needed to create a variable code that could represent a pattern, and also design a device that could “read” the code, and move the loom frames accordingly.
They finally settled on perforated cardboard cards, laced together fo form a continuous sequence (like these). The perforations form a binary code, a “yes-or-no” language. The punch cards could control the movements of rods in a mechanism attached to the loom. The rods allowed to pass through the holes activate hooks, which raise the warp so that the weft fibers can pass under them. Where there are no holes, the rods are stopped.
It was a weaver and businessman named Joseph-Marie Jacquard finally patented a funtional automated loom in 1804. Using Jacquard's loom, relatively unskilled workers could manufacture cloth with complex patterns in a fraction of the time required by veteran weavers working with traditional looms. Jacquard was lionized by the industry, and the French government. But he was vilified by the many workers who lost their jobs to this, essentially the first automated industry. They bashed in the new looms with their wooden shoes (sabot in French), earning the epithet "sabotuer."
The visionary mathematician Charles Babbage saw in the Jacquard cards a means to program a machine that would process data — a computer. While already deeply involved with his "Difference Engine" (reluctantly sponsored by the British Crown), he realized that the simple digital sytem of the cards held the potential to power a much more sophisticated machine, the "Analytical Engine." It was Babbage's collegue Ada Lovelace who realized that the Analytical Engine could potentially be used for processing any kind of data, and programmed to perform any kind of task — not just numerical calculations. Due to technical and monetary constraints, the Analytical Engine was ever fully developed. Had it been, the course of history might have been significantly different! Punched paper cards eventually became a basic tool of computer programming, and were still in used through the 1980s.
"The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves." — Ada Lovelace (1843)
19” long (unfolded) x 7” wide. Two sets available. Image of cards in use for informational purposes.