Joseph-Marie Jacquard

Who was Joseph-Marie Jacquard?

Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752 - 1854) was the son of a prosperous French weaver.

Unfortunately, Jacquard spent all of his inheritance when still a young man and wound up impoverished. He joined the French Revolutionary army and had an exciting few years of travel and warfare. When he came back to Lyons in 1799, he devoted himself to trying to build a better loom for weaving images into silk.

The resulting loom, the Jacquard loom, used punched cards to govern the warp thread control system. It revolutionised technology and was the ancestor of the computer. Charles Babbage was greatly influenced by it.

Read about Joseph Marie Jacquard and his struggle in Jacquard's Web.