JOSEPH MARIE JACQUARD: BIOGRAPHY, CONTRIBUTIONS AND INVENTIONS - BIOGRAPHIES - 2025

Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) was a French-born mechanic, silk weaver, and merchant, renowned for developing the first programmable loom for weaving patterns on cloth. This invention allowed for the mass production of complicated and expensive textile designs, with intricate patterns that would be woven automatically.

The Jacquard loom also stands out for being the first machine to use punched card technology, which were later used in multiple equipment and machinery, such as mechanical pianos or pianolas and toys.

Portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard. Source: Ephraïm Conquy

Later it became the paradigm of the first analytical machine, developed by the British Charles Babbage and by the middle of the 20th century they would be a key piece for programming computers.

Biography

Early years

Joseph Marie Jacquard was born on July 7, 1752 in the city of Lyon, France. His parents Jean Charles Jacquard and Antoinette Rive had 8 other children, but only he and one sister reached adulthood.

The future merchant received no formal education and remained illiterate until he was 13 years old. Since he was little he used to help his father, a master weaver, to operate his loom. His job was as a cartoonist and consisted of transporting the weft thread and repositioning it at different points at each step of the shuttle, thus creating the desired patterns.

This was only for a short time because, being a very arduous trade, he gave it up and started a job as a bookbinder and later a printer manufacturer.

At 10 years of age he lost his mother and at 20 his father, going on to inherit two looms and his father's workshop, as well as a vineyard and a quarry.

However, most of the weavers did not work independently but did it for silk merchants, and for this they required a permit that they did not have, so they did not prosper in the activity. During those years he was forced to become a lime burner in Bresse.

In 1778 he married Claudine Boichon, a middle-class widow with property and a substantial dowry. The following year they had their only child.

Device development

In 1790 Jacquard presented his first ideas of what would be the basis of the modern automatic loom, but the design was interrupted by the French Revolution, in which he fought on the side of the revolutionaries alongside his son Jean Marie. He was assassinated in 1795 on the outskirts of Heidelberg, after fighting in the Rhine campaign and serving in the Rhone and Loire battalion.

Jacquard began inventing various devices in 1800, looking for a way to solve one of the main problems of looms, which was splicing broken threads.

In this search for solutions, he developed a pedal loom which he presented at the French industry product exhibition in Paris and for which he received a bronze medal. Then he developed a loom to weave fishing nets and in a parallel way was assigned to the Conservatory of Arts and the Metiers in Paris.

It was in 1804 when he added some pieces to the devices he had developed and other improvements, giving rise to the so-called Jacquard loom.

This invention received great rejection from silk weavers who feared losing their jobs and therefore their livelihood. Weavers even burned the new looms and attacked Jacquard, but the time and advantages it offered warranted its widespread adoption.

Diffusion of the Jacquard loom and last years

In 1806 they declared this design public property, so Joseph began receiving a pension and royalty for the machines. By 1812 there were an estimated 11,000 Jacquard looms in France.

Subsequently, Jean Antoine Breton solved certain problems with the punch card mechanism and the sale of looms increased even more.

On August 7, 1834, at the age of 82, Joseph Marie Jacquard died in Oullins, a French commune in the Metropolis of Lyon. For that year it is estimated that there were about 30 thousand looms in use in Lyon alone. Six years later, a statue was erected to him in his hometown, where his looms were burned.

Contributions

Jacquard loom at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, England. Source: User Ghw on en.wikipedia

One of the main contributions of Jacquard was undoubtedly the interchangeable punched cards that were integrated into the loom to control the weaving pattern. It was a method with which to automate the instructions of the machine and that would be the principle used by computers well into the 20th century.

This method developed by Jacquard allowed the proliferation of machines and equipment programmed with these punched cards, such as pianolas, dolls and other mechanical toys.

These perforated metal templates or molds were also used by the Englishman Charles Babbage for his analytical engine as a means of entry and exit. Then Herman Hollerith, an American-born statistician, implemented them to enter information into his census machine.

The open and closed hole system of templates was the first use of the binary system that would later be implemented in the basic computer. Furthermore, the concept of sequencing individual cards in a specific order to create patterns would be the beginning of later creating a "program."

These punch cards came to be used to feed data to digital computers, although they were later replaced by electronic devices.

Inventions

The working prototype of what would be his loom was obtained by Jacquard in 1790 when he decided to correct the concept developed by the Frenchman Jacques de Vaucanson in which he used a perforated roll of paper to control the weaving process.

Between 1804 and 1805 he finally introduced his Jacquard loom, also called a Jacquard accessory or Jacquard mechanism.

This improvement involved the incorporation of a device to control individual warp yarns. This allowed the production of intricate weaving patterns such as tapestries, brocades, damasks and printed knits automatically and much faster than with other modalities.

Other inventions that Joseph Marie Jacquard developed include a pedal loom in 1801 and a loom for weaving fishing nets in 1803.

References

1. Encyclopædia Britannica (2019, August 03). Joseph-Marie Jacquard. Recovered from britannica.com
2. "Joseph Marie Jacquard" (2019, October 13). Encyclopedia of World Biography. Recovered from Encyclopedia.com
3. Joseph Marie Jacquard. (2019, October 17). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Recovered from es.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2019, July 5). Joseph Marie Jacquard. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Recovered from en.wikipedia.org
5. NNDB (2019). Joseph Marie Jacquard. Recovered from nndb.com
6. Medina, NM (2011, September 23). Jacquard, the computer weaver. Recovered from rtve.es