The Jacquard Loom

Joseph-Marie Jacquard was born in the mid-1700’s in France to a family in the textile industry.  Although he initially explored the areas of book binding and cutlery later, after the death of his parents and after being involved in the French Revolution, he returned to the textile industry and designed what became known as the Jacquard loom.  The Jacquard loom made it so that the loom could make the same highly-detailed patterns time after time.  This was possible because of the cards with holes in them that directed the weaving, with each card correlating to one row of the design.  As one source described, “the Jacquard loom used a system of hooks and needles to lift the appropriate warp threads. The pattern was stored on a collection of thick paper cards perforated with rectangular holes. As the fabric was woven, the hooks were held stationary by the surface of the card. However, whenever a hole was encountered, a hook would be allowed to pass through to lift its thread. By stringing together a large number of cards, an intricate pattern could be created.”

An interesting side note is that other textile mills would sometimes steal these cards creating as another source stated it, “an early instance of software piracy”.

The punch cards are not a things of the past, and while many Jacquard looms remain in use today the area of use of punch cards has expanded.  Looking at the pictures of these cards seems to remind me of something that looks a lot like that—something I’ve recently seen in the testing center. J