Diff — Joseph-Marie Jacquard

**Joseph-Marie Jacquard** (7 July 1752 – 7 August 1834) was a French weaver and inventor from Lyon whose **[[Punched card|punched-card]] [[Jacquard Loom|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.

## Life

### The weaver's son

Jacquard was born into a Lyon weaving family — his father was a master weaver, his mother a pattern reader — and he was sent to work at the loom as a child in place of much schooling; he reportedly learned to read as a teenager from his brother-in-law. After his father's death in 1772 he inherited the workshop and two looms, drifted through trades — bookbinding, typefounding, cutlery, a failed plaster venture — lost most of the inheritance, and by the late 1780s was back in Lyon doing journeyman weaving work. 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.

### Revolution and the invention

He was experimenting with loom automation by 1790, but the French Revolution interrupted everything — Jacquard fought on the Republican side during the siege of Lyon in 1793, lost his only son Jean Marie to the fighting, and fled with the retreating army. Returning to Lyon after the amnesty, he resumed work and produced his key device around 1800–1801: an attachment that read a pattern from punched cards, building on earlier punched-paper mechanisms by **Basile Bouchon** (1725), **Jean-Baptiste Falcon** (1728), and **Jacques de Vaucanson** (1745). Jacquard's contribution was making it *practical* — needles and hooks instead of fragile paper rolls, cards chained so a pattern could run indefinitely.

Demonstrated in Paris in **1801** — where a simpler net-making machine of his had already earned a bronze medal — the loom was patented in **1804**. In 1805 Napoleon inspected it personally in Lyon; the reward was not riches but a pension of **3,000 francs**, a royalty of 50 francs per loom sold, a medal — and the design declared effectively public property of French industry, which is precisely why it spread so fast.

### The riots and the comeback

Lyon's weavers saw their livelihoods encoded onto cards and responded with fury. Early looms were smashed, Jacquard was attacked in the street — the famous story has him thrown into the Rhône — 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.

Jacquard spent his later years honored but modest, improving the mechanism until the end. He died in **Oullins**, just south of Lyon, on 7 August 1834, aged 82 — the man thrown in the river by weavers had outlived the riots to be celebrated as the savior of the city's industry.

## Legacy

- In textiles, "**jacquard**" is still the everyday word for figured woven fabric — his name is woven into the material itself.

- The famous woven **portrait of Jacquard** — produced by the Lyon firm Didier, Petit et Cie around 1839–1840, a few years after his death — required some 24,000 cards and is often called the first "program" whose output you can still hold.

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.

## See also

- [[Jacquard Loom]]

- [[Punched card]]

- [[Charles Babbage]]

- [[Herman Hollerith]]

- [[History of Programming]]

[[Category:History]]

[[Category:People]]