| | **Joseph-Marie Jacquard** (7 July 1752 – 7 August 1834) was a French weaver and inventor from Lyon whose **punched-card loom** changed two industries at once: textiles, which he automated, and — a century later — computing, which inherited his idea that a machine could follow a stored deck of instructions. |
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| | ## Life |
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| | ### The weaver's son |
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| | Jacquard was born into a Lyon weaving family and grew up at the loom. He spent his younger years drifting through trades — bookbinding, typefounding, plaster work, a failed lime-kiln venture — before returning to weaving after his father's death left him a small inheritance, much of it lost to failed business attempts. He knew the loom's drudgery firsthand, and in particular the figure-weaving bottleneck: the draw boy who had to lift the right warp threads by hand for every pass. |
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| | ### The invention |
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| | During the upheaval of the French Revolution Jacquard worked on automating that selection step, building on earlier punched-paper mechanisms by Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1728), and Jacques de Vaucanson (1745). His decisive improvement — a full punched-card control with needles and hooks — was demonstrated in **1801** and patented in **1804**. The reward from Napoleon Bonaparte's government was not riches but something stranger: a pension of **3,000 francs**, a royalty per loom sold, and a medal — and the loom declared effectively public property of French industry. |
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| | ### The riots and the comeback |
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| | Lyon's weavers saw their livelihoods encoded onto cards and responded with fury. Early looms were smashed, Jacquard was attacked in the street, and the unrest became one of the earliest documented fights between labor and automation. The adoption curve won regardless: by **1812** roughly 11,000 Jacquard looms were working in France, and the city's silk output exploded even as the draw-boy trade vanished. |
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| | Jacquard spent his later years honored but modest — the man who had been thrown in the Rhône by weavers was eventually celebrated by them as the savior of Lyon's industry. He died in **Oullins** in 1834, aged 82. |
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| | ## Legacy |
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| | - In textiles, "**jacquard**" is still the everyday word for figured woven fabric — his name is woven into the material itself. |
| - | - In computing, his card mechanism is the direct ancestor of the program deck: [[Charles Babbage|Babbage]] borrowed the cards for the Analytical Engine, [[Herman Hollerith|Hollerith]] carried them into data processing, and IBM's punched-card standard kept the idea alive into the computer age. |
| + | - In computing, his card mechanism is the direct ancestor of the program deck: [[Charles Babbage|Babbage]] borrowed the cards for the [[Analytical Engine]], [[Herman Hollerith|Hollerith]] carried them into data processing, and IBM's punched-card standard kept the idea alive into the computer age. |
| | - The portrait woven of him by his own loom — about 24,000 cards' worth — is sometimes called the first "program" whose output survives. |
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| | His story is the quiet start of [[History of Programming|the history of programming]]: before any computer existed, there was a machine that obeyed a deck of instructions — and a person who imagined it. |
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| | ## See also |
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| | - [[Jacquard Loom]] |
| | - [[History of Programming]] |
| | - [[Main Page]] |
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| | [[Category:History]] |
| | [[Category:People]] |
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