Tag: jacquard loom

shannybasar:

I expected to learn about art at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition but not about the role of a weaving loom in the development of computers.

In an essay about Grayson Perry’s series of tapestries, The Vanity of Small Differences, Adam Lowe explains that in 1804 Frenchman Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented a loom that used punched cards to program the pattern being weaved:

These cards formed a chain that was inserted into the loom, allowing some hooks to pass through the punched holes and therefore determining the movement of the warp threads. When one row was finished, the next chain of cards was inserted, and so on until the weaving was complete.

By 1812, just eight years later, 11,000 Jacquard looms were in operation across France.

Charles Babbage, the English mathematician, saw the loom and realised the same process could be used for calculations. As a result Babbage developed a calculating machine with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter. Lowe says: 

In 1834 she wrote: “Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mechanical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connection with each other – we may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”