Jacquards' Web (7 page)

Besides, the really important idea—the one Jacquard certainly
did
pioneer—was the notion of
applying punched cards in the
loom control system automatically
so that the loom in effect
continually feeds itself
with the information it needs to carry out the next row of weaving. It is because of this system that the Jacquard loom was a machine of a calibre and sophistication that had never been seen before. In fact, when it was patented in
1804
, it was unquestionably the most complex mechanism in the world.

Jacquard built an
automatic
loom that was reliable, rapid, and which combined all his ideas into an effective, commercially viable, and mechanically stunning contraption. Using it, the weaver did not need an assistant at all. The weaver alone had the ability to control the mechanism that manoeuvred all the warp threads into the position they needed to be in for each successive row of weaving. The weaver alone would also handle the shuttle 37

Jacquard’s Web

that would be passed through the shed once the shed was prepared.

Above all, the Jacquard loom was infinitely
flexible.
Any image or decoration could be embodied into the chain of punched cards and woven by the Jacquard loom. Jacquard could have used his loom to weave an image of a laptop computer, had anybody known how to draw one. If they had, they would have been drawing one of the loom’s descendants. In any event, the Jacquard loom had been born.

And how
rapidly
did it weave? The astonishing truth is that the Jacquard loom enabled decorated fabric to be woven about
twenty-four
times more quickly than the drawloom. Whereas in the past even the most skilled weaver and draw-boy duo could only manage two rows or picks of woven fabric every minute, a skilled lone weaver using the Jacquard loom could manage to fit in an average of about forty-eight picks per minute of working time.

This was a prodigious gain in speed for the technology of the time. We can more readily appreciate the impact of the speed increase when we consider that, today, a supersonic jet aircraft flies at up to about twenty-four times the average speed of a motor car. The increase in speed was as remarkable as that.

Using the Jacquard loom, it was possible for a skilled weaver to produce two feet of stunningly beautiful decorated silk fabric
every day
compared with the one inch of fabric per day that was the best that could be managed with the drawloom.

The loom also took all the hard work and difficulty out of making the image. Once the cards had been made for a particular design, the weaver merely had to operate the shuttle and advance the chain of cards, one at a time, usually by means of a foot-treadle. For the first time in the history of silk-weaving the fabulously ornate designs—works of art in themselves—could be produced automatically. A full technical account of how the Jacquard loom works can be found in Appendix
3
.

38

The Emperor’s new clothes

Today, some of the fabrics produced on a Jacquard loom in the first decades of the eighteenth century are on display at the Museum of Weaving and Decorative Arts in Lyons. The colours of the fabrics are slightly faded, but the beauty of the images remains stunning, warning us never to underestimate the technology of the past.

After Carnot, the next French VIP to acknowledge Jacquard’s achievement was Napoleon himself. Napoleon had never beaten the British militarily, but here was a French machine that had won a massive, comprehensive, advantage over British technology. The small man was delighted. And the fabrics it wove also pleased Napoleon greatly. They were rich, lustrous, and beautiful: not unlike how he perceived himself, in fact. The days of the pampered French nobility were over, but luxury never goes out of fashion.

During Napoleon’s reign as Emperor from December
1804

to April
1814
, he insisted that his ceremonial clothes be woven by the silk-weavers of Lyons. From
1805
onwards, this meant the Emperor’s clothes were invariably woven on a Jacquard loom.

Napoleon and Jacquard met for the first time on
18
April
1805
, when the Emperor and his wife Josephine visited Jacquard’s Lyons workshop. Three days earlier, on
15
April
1805
, Napoleon had issued a decree declaring the Jacquard loom public property.

The same decree compensated Jacquard by awarding him a hand-some annual pension for life of
3000
francs (about £
60 000
or $
96 000
in modern terms) along with a royalty of
50
francs (about

£
1000
or $
1600
) for every Jacquard loom brought into use in France, with the royalty applying for a period of six years. This generosity on the part of the French Government towards a successful inventor had been official policy even before the Revolution. Several other inventors of different kinds of looms had been awarded government grants during the eighteenth century, but none of their inventions remotely rivalled Jacquard’s in stature or importance.

During his meeting with Napoleon, Jacquard expressed, in his modest and quiet way, a keen gratitude for the pension and 39

Jacquard’s Web

the royalty his Emperor had granted him. A delighted Napoleon, hearing this, turned towards his entourage of courtiers, advisers, and bodyguards. ‘Think of all those who incessantly come to me with demands for government grants and other financial favours!’

he exclaimed, ‘and here is a man of vast talent and industry who is happy with so little!’ Napoleon took to Jacquard from the first, and played an enthusiastic personal role in encouraging the use of the loom throughout France.

After this recognition at the very highest level, Jacquard basked in prosperity and success. In
1819
, when he was sixty-seven years old, the Government awarded him a gold medal, as well as the highly coveted Cross of the Legion of Honour, for his original
1804
invention of the automatic punched-card loom. By the
1820
s, after years of helping the weavers of Lyons to make the most of their Jacquard looms, Jacquard accepted that the loom was now as efficient as he could make it with the prevailing technology. He retired to the pretty village of Oullins, a few miles from Lyons, and now a suburb of the city. There, Jacquard enjoyed a prosperous rural life, even herding sheep on land he had purchased. He died peacefully at Oullins on
7
August
1834
.

Claudine had pre-deceased him, in
1825
. This reputation went
1841

on growing after his death. A woven image of

(see facing

page) shows an important visitor to a Lyons weaving studio receiving a woven portrait of Jacquard.

There is a story, still spoken of in the few remaining weaving workshops of Croix Rousse, that Jacquard was once accosted by angry draw-boys. Many of them were, in fact, grown men rather than boys. They were furious with him for having invented a machine that had put them out of work. They pushed him around, and ended up throwing him into the Rhône or the Saône.

Perhaps it really happened, perhaps it did not. It is certainly a dramatic enough illustration of the fact that brilliant new technology does unfortunately tend to throw people out of work. But the path to acceptance of a new invention in the world at large is rarely a smooth one.

40

A visit by the Duke D’Aumale in 1841 to the Croix Rousse studio of the master weaver M. Carquillat. This image, like the Jacquard portrait, is astonishingly enough a
woven
picture, not an engraving. It depicts the Duke receiving a copy of the woven Jacquard portrait (Lyons Museum of Textiles) 41

Jacquard’s Web

The sheer popularity of the Jacquard loom over the decades that followed testifies to its effectiveness. By
1812
there were about
11 000
Jacquard looms in use in France, and by
1832
there were already about
600
Jacquard looms in Britain, despite energetic French efforts to keep the technology of the Jacquard loom secret. It would, after all, be from Britain, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, that the use of the Jacquard loom would spread worldwide, rather than from France. In Britain too, in the
1830
s, the steam engine was first used to power the loom by means of a drive-belt. The powered loom grew rapidly in popularity. And with the dawn of the twentieth century, electricity started to be employed as a more precise and flexible power source.

Yet there have always been Jacquard weavers who adopted a purist approach, especially when weaving the most meticulous and valuable fabrics. As we have seen, there are still Jacquard weavers in Lyons today who operate their looms by hand. They produce luxurious brocade fabrics for business tycoons, stars of the movie and music businesses and other wealthy people. Most of Europe’s royalty have been deposed, and those who remain usually have to be on guard against being seen to live too extravagantly. The new kings and queens of show-business, fashion, and industry are, in a sense, the descendants of the European royalty who first created the demand for decorated silk fabric that led to the prodigious growth of Lyons as the centre of the world’s silk-weaving industry.

Today, modern fully automatic and powered Jacquard looms continue to embody leading-edge technology. This enables them to operate at speeds undreamed of by Jacquard himself, yet these modern Jacquard looms make use of exactly the same principle embodied in the loom Jacquard patented in
1804
. This is tacitly acknowledged in the fact that these modern looms are also known as Jacquard looms, even today. And within the modern clothing industry, the name Jacquard has achieved the accolade of being written with an initial lower-case letter to denote 42

The Emperor’s new clothes

‘jacquard’ fabric: intricately decorated material of silk or other fine fabrics woven on modern Jacquard looms.

These modern Jacquard looms make use of computerized image scanners. These allow any visual image that is to be woven to be inputted into the loom. The scanner, in turn, is linked to a computer that converts the image into pixels in a computer program. This program is used to control the hooks that lift the correct warp threads to form the image during the weaving process.

The speed of the modern Jacquard looms, and the intricacy of the fabrics they can weave, are alike dazzling. Modern Jacquards weave familiar types of fabric such as clothing and home furnish-ings, as well as fabrics for unfamiliar, even surprising, purposes.

For example, some modern Jacquards weave the tubes of syn-thetic fabric employed in artificial valves implanted inside heart bypass patients. Here, the weaving takes place under special sterile conditions. Air bags employed in cars are also usually woven on Jacquard looms. In these cases, and in others where the fabric must meet extremely demanding specifications, a Jacquard loom is used because of the strength, flexibility, and utter precision of the fabrics it weaves.

The story of Jacquard’s idea might easily have ended with the new kind of loom transforming the French silk industry and then the world’s. But once the idea had been born, it was taken up by inventors as inspired and brilliant as Jacquard himself; inventors who were fortunate enough to have access to much better technology than he did. Jacquard had applied his revolutionary automation idea to the industrial activity he knew best. But the potential of the Jacquard loom extended far beyond silk-weaving.

In England in
1836
, Charles Babbage never had the slightest doubt about
that
. It is his inspired use of Jacquard’s idea, incorporated into what is considered—with justification—to be a Victorian computer, that takes our story into a new country and—in truth—into a new dimension.

43

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From weaving to computing

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I will tell you the events of the last few days. I am married and have quarrelled with my father. He has no rational reason whatever; he has not one objection to my wife in any respect.

But he hates the abstract idea of marriage and is uncommonly fond of money.