The year is 1801. François is not a programmer; he is a weaver. But what Joseph Marie Jacquard has just demonstrated in Lyon will change the course of technological history forever. His loom, controlled by punched cards, became the first device to carry out recorded instructions: the ancestor of every computer program that followed.
How did the Jacquard loom work?
A traditional loom required a worker to lift the right warp threads by hand before every pass of the weft. With intricate patterns, that meant hundreds of different combinations, which the weaver had to perform from memory or by following painstakingly written instructions. Jacquard replaced that human memory with something brilliantly simple: a series of cards with holes punched in them. Each card corresponded to one pass of the weft. Where there was a hole, a hook passed through the card and lifted the thread. Where there was no hole, the thread stayed down. By arranging the cards in the right order, you could “program” any fabric and reproduce it exactly, without a skilled weaver.
The industrial revolution and the weavers’ resistance
Not everyone welcomed the invention. Weavers, afraid of losing their livelihoods, destroyed prototypes of the loom. Napoleon, recognizing its potential, personally backed Jacquard and decreed that the loom would become public property. Jacquard received an annual pension and a royalty on every loom sold. By the 1830s, more than 30,000 Jacquard looms were at work in France. The weaving revolution was a fact, and few people realized that an idea had just been born that would become the foundation of all of computer science.
From fabric to computer – Jacquard’s influence on the history of AI
When Charles Babbage designed his Analytical Engine in the 1830s, he drew directly on the Jacquard loom: punched cards were to control the operations of his machine. Herman Hollerith used the same mechanism to process the data from the 1890 US census, and that was the seed of IBM. For the next 150 years, until magnetic disks became widespread, punched cards were the main medium for data and programs. A single weaving invention set off an entire chain: Babbage → Hollerith → IBM → computers → artificial intelligence. Next time you use ChatGPT, remember that, in a sense, you are sitting at a virtual loom from Lyon.