Jacquard loom
device · 1804 · Industrial Revolution
A loom in which a complex pattern is set by a chain of punched cards.
Inventor: Joseph Marie Jacquard.
What it is made of
- Flying shuttle — has part. A shuttle.
Principles and materials it uses
- Mechanical reproduction of information — uses. The loom reproduces a pattern recorded on punched cards as many times as needed.
- Punched card — uses. Each punched card sets one pass of the pattern.
- Program control of a machine — uses. The chain of cards is the program of the pattern.
- Wood — is made of. The loom is a wooden frame.
History: what it evolved from and what it influenced
- Bouchon’s loom — evolved from. Jacquard combined and refined the ideas of Bouchon, Falcon and Vaucanson.
- Babbage’s Analytical Engine — inspired. Babbage borrowed Jacquard’s punched cards directly for entering operations and data; Ada Lovelace compared the machine to the Jacquard loom.
- Automaton — was inspired by. Vaucanson, the maker of automata, built an automatic loom whose ideas Jacquard used.
What it is a kind of
- Loom — is a kind of. A loom with punched cards.
Things built in a similar way
- Gutenberg printing press — works like. An analogy, not proven influence: both set type and a chain of punched cards are a replaceable pattern that a machine reproduces over and over.
- Player piano — works like. A perforated medium controls a machine — a weaving one in one case, a musical one in the other.