(decorative fabrics, carpets, tablecloths, etc.). Allows you to separately manage each warp thread or a small group of them. Created in 1804.

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Named after the French weaver and inventor Joseph Marie Jaccard.

Application

The Jacquard machine makes it possible, during the formation of a shed on a loom, to separately control the movement of each thread or a small group of warp threads and to produce fabrics whose repeat consists of a large number of threads. Using a jacquard machine, you can make patterned dress and decorative fabrics, carpets, tablecloths, etc.

Description

Jacquard machine has knives, hooks, needles, frame board, frame cords and perforated prism. The warp threads, made their way into the eyes of the faces (heddles), are connected to the machine with the help of arcade cords threaded into the dividing board for uniform distribution over the width of the machine. The knives fixed in the knife frame reciprocate in a vertical plane. The hooks located in the zone of action of the knives are captured by them and rise up, and through the frame and arcade cords, the warp threads also rise up, forming the upper part of the throat (the main overlaps in the fabric). Hooks, removed from the zone of action of the knives, go down along with the frame board. The lowering of the hooks and warp threads occurs under the action of gravity weights. The lowered warp threads form the lower part of the shed (weft weaves in the fabric). Hooks are removed from the zone of action of the knives by needles, which are acted upon by a prism that has rocking and rotational movements. A cardboard is put on the prism, consisting of separate paper cards, which have punched and non-cut places against the ends of the needles. When meeting a cut place, the needle enters the prism, and the hook remains in the zone of action of the knife, and the uncut place of the card moves the needle and disables the hook from interacting with the knife. The combination of punched and non-cut places on the cards makes it possible to carry out a quite definite alternation of rises and falls of the warp threads and the formation of a pattern on the fabric.

A vivid example of a computer-controlled machine, created long before the advent of computers. A punched card is typed in binary code: there is a hole, there is no hole. Accordingly, some thread rose, some did not. The shuttle throws a thread into the formed gap, forming a two-sided ornament, where one side is a color or texture negative of the other. Since it takes about 100 or more weft threads and even more warp threads to create even a small pattern, a huge number of perforated cards were created that were tied into a single ribbon. Scrolling, she could occupy two floors. One punched card corresponds to one shuttle pass.

For many years, punched cards have served as the main media for storing and processing information. In our minds, a punched card is firmly associated with a computer that occupies an entire room, and with a heroic Soviet scientist who makes a breakthrough in science. Punched cards are the ancestors of floppy disks, disks, hard drives, flash memory. But they did not appear at all with the invention of the first computers, but much earlier, at the very beginning of the 19th century ...

Falcon machine Jean-Baptiste Falcon created his machine on the basis of the first such machine designed by Basile Bouchon. He was the first to come up with a system of cardboard punched cards connected in a chain.

Alexander Petrov

April 12, 1805 Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife visited Lyon. The largest weaving center in the country in the 16th-18th centuries was badly damaged by the Revolution and was in a deplorable state. Most manufactories went bankrupt, production stopped, and the international market was increasingly filled with English textiles. Wanting to support the Lyon masters, in 1804 Napoleon placed a large order for cloth here, and a year later he arrived in the city in person. During the visit, the emperor visited the workshop of a certain Joseph Jacquard, an inventor, where the emperor was shown an amazing machine. Mounted on top of an ordinary loom, the bulk tinkled like a long ribbon of perforated tin plates, and from the loom stretched, winding onto a shaft, a silk fabric with an exquisite pattern. At the same time, no master was required: the machine worked by itself, and, as they explained to the emperor, even an apprentice could well serve it.

1728. Falcon machine. Jean-Baptiste Falcon created his machine on the basis of the first such machine designed by Basile Bouchon. He was the first to come up with a system of cardboard punched cards connected in a chain.

Napoleon liked the car. A few days later, he ordered that Jaccard's patent for a weaving machine be transferred to the public, and the inventor himself be given an annual pension of 3,000 francs and the right to receive a small deduction of 50 francs from each loom in France on which his machine stood. However, in the end, this deduction amounted to a significant amount - by 1812, 18,000 looms were equipped with a new device, and in 1825 - already 30,000.

The inventor lived the rest of his days in prosperity, he died in 1834, and six years later, the grateful citizens of Lyon erected a monument to Jaccard on the very spot where his workshop had once been. The Jacquard (or, in the old transcription, "Jacquard") machine was an important building block in the foundation of the industrial revolution, no less important than Railway or steam boiler. But not everything in this story is simple and cloudless. For example, the "grateful" Lyons, who later honored Jacquard with a monument, broke his first unfinished loom and attempted several times on his life. And the car, to tell the truth, was not invented by him at all.

1900. Weaving shop. This photograph was taken over a century ago in the Darwell Weaving Mill, East Ayrshire, Scotland. Many weaving shops look like this to this day - not because the owners of the factories spare money for modernization, but because the jacquard looms of those years are still the most versatile and convenient.

How the machine worked

To understand the revolutionary novelty of the invention, it is necessary to present in general terms the principle of the loom. If you look at the fabric, you can see that it consists of tightly interwoven longitudinal and transverse threads. In the manufacturing process, longitudinal threads (warp) are pulled along the machine; half of them are attached through one to the “shaddle” frame, the other half - to the other same frame. These two frames move up and down relative to each other, spreading the warp threads, and a shuttle pulls the transverse thread (weft) back and forth into the resulting shed. The result is a simple canvas with threads intertwined through one. There can be more than two shaft frames, and they can move in a complex sequence, raising or lowering the threads in groups, which is why a pattern is formed on the surface of the fabric. But the number of frames is still small, rarely more than 32, so the pattern is simple, regularly repeating.

There are no frames at all on the jacquard loom. Each thread can be moved separately from the others with the help of a rod with a ring that catches it. Therefore, on the canvas, you can weave a pattern of any degree of complexity, even a picture. The sequence of the threads is set using a long looped tape of punched cards, each card corresponds to one passage of the shuttle. The card is pressed against the "reading" wire probes, some of them go into the holes and remain motionless, the rest are recessed with the card down. The probes are connected to rods that control the movement of the threads.

Intricately patterned canvases could be woven even before Jacquard, but only the best masters and the work was hellish. A tugging worker climbed inside the machine and, at the command of the master, manually raised or lowered individual warp threads, the number of which sometimes numbered in the hundreds. The process was very slow, required constant attention, and mistakes were inevitable. In addition, the re-equipment of the machine from one intricately patterned canvas to another work sometimes dragged on for many days. Jacquard's machine did the work quickly, without errors - and itself. The only difficult thing now was stuffing punched cards. It took weeks to produce one set, but once the cards were made, they could be used again and again.

predecessors

As already mentioned, the "smart machine" was not invented by Jacquard - he only finalized the inventions of his predecessors. In 1725, a quarter of a century before the birth of Joseph Jacquard, the first such device was created by the Lyon weaver Basile Bouchon. Bouchon's machine was controlled by a perforated paper tape, where each passage of the shuttle corresponded to one row of holes. However, there were few holes, so the device changed the position of only a small number of individual threads.

The next inventor who tried to improve the loom was named Jean-Baptiste Falcon. He replaced the tape with small sheets of cardboard tied at the corners into a chain; on each sheet, the holes were already arranged in several rows and could control a large number of threads. The Falcon machine turned out to be more successful than the previous one, and although it was not widely used, the master managed to sell about 40 copies during his life.

The third person who undertook to bring the loom to perfection was the inventor Jacques de Vaucanson, who in 1741 was appointed inspector of silk weaving manufactories. Vaucanson worked on his machine for many years, but his invention was not successful: the device, too complex and expensive to manufacture, could still control a relatively small number of threads, and the fabric with a simple pattern did not pay off the cost of the equipment.

1841. Carkill weaving workshop. A woven drawing (made in 1844) depicts a scene that took place on August 24, 1841. Monsieur Carkill, the owner of the workshop, presents the Duc d'Omal with a canvas with a portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard, woven in the same way in 1839. The subtlety of the work is incredible: the details are smaller than on the engravings.

The successes and failures of Joseph Jacquard

Joseph Marie Jacquard was born in 1752 in the suburbs of Lyon in a family of hereditary canutes - weavers who worked with silk. He was taught all the intricacies of the craft, helped his father in the workshop, and after the death of his parent inherited the business, but he took up weaving far from immediately. Joseph managed to change many professions, was tried for debts, got married, and after the siege of Lyon he left as a soldier with a revolutionary army, taking his sixteen-year-old son with him. And only after his son died in one of the battles, Jacquard decided to return to the family business.

He returned to Lyon and opened a weaving workshop. However, the business was not very successful, and Jacquard became interested in invention. He decided to make a machine that would surpass the creations of Bouchon and Falcon, would be simple and cheap enough, and at the same time could make silk fabric that was not inferior in quality to hand-woven silk. At first, the designs that came out from under his hands were not very successful. Jaccard's first machine, which worked as it should, did not make silk, but ... fishing nets. He read in the newspaper that the Royal Society for the Support of the Arts in England had announced a competition for the manufacture of such a device. He never received an award from the British, but France became interested in his brainchild and was even invited to an industrial exhibition in Paris. It was a landmark trip. Firstly, they paid attention to Jacquard, he acquired the necessary connections and even got money for further research, and secondly, he visited the Museum of Arts and Crafts, where the loom of Jacques de Vaucanson stood. Jacquard saw him, and the missing parts fell into place in his imagination: he understood how his machine should work.

With his developments, Jacquard attracted the attention of not only Parisian academics. The Lyon weavers quickly realized what a threat the new invention posed. In Lyon, whose population by the beginning of the 19th century was hardly 100,000, more than 30,000 people worked in the weaving industry - that is, every third inhabitant of the city was, if not a master, then an employee or apprentice in a weaving workshop. An attempt to simplify the process of making fabrics would deprive many of the work.

The incredible precision of the Jacquard loom

The famous painting “Visit of the Duke d’Omal to the weaving workshop of Mr. Carkill” is not an engraving at all, as it might seem, the drawing is completely woven on a loom equipped with a jacquard machine. The size of the canvas is 109 x 87 cm, the work was done, in fact, by the master Michel-Marie Carkill for the firm Didier, Petit and C. The process of mis en carte - or programming the image on punched cards - lasted many months, and several people were involved in this, and the production of the canvas itself took 8 hours. A tape of 24,000 (more than 1,000 binary cells each) punched cards was a mile long. The picture was reproduced only on special orders, it is known about several canvases of this type, stored in various museums around the world. And one portrait of Jacquard woven in this way was commissioned by Charles Babbage, Dean of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. By the way, the Duke d'Omal depicted on the canvas is none other than the youngest son of the last king of France, Louis Philippe I.

As a result, one fine morning, a crowd came to Jaccard's workshop and broke everything that he was building. The inventor himself was severely punished to leave the unkind and take up a craft, following the example of his late father. Contrary to the exhortations of the brothers in the shop, Jacquard did not give up his research, but now he had to work in secret, and he finished the next car only by 1804. Jacquard received a patent and even a medal, but he was careful not to trade "smart" machines on his own and, on the advice of the merchant Gabriel Detille, humbly asked the emperor to transfer the invention to the public property of the city of Lyon. The emperor granted the request, and rewarded the inventor. You know the end of the story.

The Age of Punched Cards

The very principle of the jacquard machine - the ability to change the sequence of the machine by loading new cards into it - was revolutionary. Now we call it the word "programming". The sequence of actions for the jacquard machine was given by the binary sequence: there is a hole - there is no hole.

1824. Difference engine. Babbage Charles Babbage's first attempt at building an analytical engine was unsuccessful. The cumbersome mechanical device, which is a combination of shafts and gears, calculated quite accurately, but required too complicated maintenance and a highly skilled operator.

Soon after the jacquard machine became widespread, perforated cards (as well as perforated ribbons and discs) began to be used in a variety of devices.

shuttle machine

At the beginning of the 19th century, the main type of automatic weaving device was a shuttle loom. It was arranged quite simply: the warp threads were stretched vertically, and a bullet-shaped shuttle flew between them back and forth, dragging a transverse (weft) thread through the warp. From time immemorial, the shuttle was dragged by hand, in the 18th century this process was automated; the shuttle was "fired" from one side, taken by the other, turned around - and the process was repeated. Zev (the distance between the warp threads) for the flight of the shuttle was provided with the help of a reed - a weaving comb, which separated one part of the warp threads from the other and lifted it.

But perhaps the most famous of these inventions - and the most iconic on the way from the loom to the computer - is Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. In 1834, Babbage, a mathematician inspired by Jaccard's experience with punched cards, began work on an automatic device for performing a wide variety of mathematical tasks. Prior to this, he had had the bad experience of building a "difference engine", a bulky 14-ton monster filled with gears; the principle of processing digital data with the help of gears has been used since the time of Pascal, and now they were to be replaced by punched cards.

1890. Hollerith tabulator. Herman Hollerith's tabulating machine was built to process the results of the 1890 All-American Census. But it turned out that the capabilities of the machine go far beyond the scope of the task.

Everything that is in a modern computer was present in the analytical engine: a processor for performing mathematical operations (“mill”), memory (“warehouse”), where the values ​​​​of variables and intermediate results of operations were stored, there was a central control device that also performed input functions. output. The analytical engine had to use two types of punched cards: a large format for storing numbers, and a smaller one for software. Babbage worked on his invention for 17 years, but was never able to finish it - there was not enough money. The current model of Babbage's "analytical engine" was built only in 1906, so the immediate predecessor of computers was not it, but devices called tabulators.

A tabulator is a machine for processing large amounts of statistical information, textual and digital; information was entered into the tabulator using a huge number of punched cards. The first tabulators were designed and created for the needs of the US Census Office, but soon they were used for a variety of tasks. From the very beginning, one of the leaders in this field was the company of Herman Hollerith, the man who invented and manufactured in 1890 the first electronic tabulating machine. Hollerith's company was renamed IBM in 1924.

When the tabulators were replaced by the first computers, the principle of control using punched cards was preserved here. It was much more convenient to load data and programs into the machine using cards, rather than switching numerous toggle switches. In some places punched cards are used to this day. Thus, for almost 200 years, the main language in which a person communicated with "smart" machines was the language of punched cards.

The article "The loom, the great-grandfather of computers" was published in the journal Popular Mechanics (

| jacquard loom

Jacquard loom (Jacquard loom, Jacquard loom, Jacquard machine) - a shedding (shed - the space between the main threads moved apart) loom mechanism for producing large-patterned fabrics, such as decorative fabrics, tablecloths, carpets, etc.). The machine allows you to separately manage each warp thread or a small group of them. Named after the French weaver and inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard (Jacquard, 1752-1834).

At first glance, the next step in development after Pascalina and the Leibniz calculator has nothing to do with numbers and calculations, but this is not so. Throughout the 18th century, French silk factories experimented with various kinds of mechanisms that controlled the machine using wooden drums, perforated tapes and cards. In each of the three options, the thread was raised and lowered in accordance with the presence of holes (shallows), so a fabric pattern was obtained.

In 1804, Jacquard designed a fully automated machine, with which it was possible to reproduce the most complex patterns. The work of the machine was programmed by a deck of punched cards, each of which, in turn, controlled one move of the shuttle. To move on to a new pattern, the machine operator simply changed the deck of punched cards. Of course, an amazing invention caused a real revolution in weaving, and the principles laid down then are used to this day! Just punched cards were destined to play a role in computer programming, because the Jacquard machine took its place in the history of computers ...

A new century has come, all new inventors tried to storm the city called "Computer Engineering" and the Englishman Charles Babbage came closest to creating a computer (as we understand it now).

Babbage's main passion was the struggle for impeccable mathematical accuracy. The English scientist announced a real "crusade" against errors in the tables of logarithms, which at that time were widely used in calculations by astronomers, mathematicians and even sea navigators. Babbage loved precision, nothing could escape his attentive gaze. Once he sent a letter to the poet Tennyson, in which he sharply criticized his lines "Every moment a man dies, every moment another is born." Due to the fact that the population of the Earth is growing, Babbage noted, these lines should still be brought into line with the truth: "Every moment one person dies, every moment one is born and one sixteenth of another."

The greatest achievement of Charles Babbage, and at the same time his greatest pain, was the development of the principles underlying the modern computer, a whole century before it became technically possible to implement them. He spent several decades, large government subsidies and much of his own money in an unsuccessful attempt to create a computing machine that worked on these principles. Exactly at

At the beginning of the 19th century, the French weaver and inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented new technology industrial application of patterns on fabrics. Now such fabrics are called jacquard, and his loom is called a jacquard loom. Jacquard's invention makes it possible to obtain a variety of lighting effects on the surface of the fabric, and in combination with different colors and material of the threads, beautiful, soft transitions of tones and sharply defined contours of patterns, sometimes very complex (ornaments, landscapes, portraits, etc.). Jacquard is used for sewing dresses, outerwear, furniture fabrics, curtains, as well as for the manufacture of lanyards, ribbons for badges and other promotional materials (stripes, chevrons, labels, promotions).
Joseph Jacquard was born on July 7, 1752. in Lyon. His father owned a small family weaving business (two looms) and Joseph also started his own. labor activity as a child in one of the many weaving factories in Lyon. But this hard and unsafe work did not attract him, and the future inventor went to study and work in a bookbinding workshop.
But Jaccard was not destined to become an outstanding inventor in bookbinding or printing. Soon his parents die, and he inherits looms and a small piece of land. As a result of several unsuccessful business projects, Joseph loses most of his father's inheritance, but at the same time he is fascinated by the engineering problem of improving the loom.
Despite the rapid development of weaving in France, the possibilities of the looms were severely limited. One-color fabrics or with colored stripes were produced en masse. Fabrics with embroidered patterns were still made by hand. Jacquard wanted to improve the loom so that patterned fabrics could be produced industrially.
By 1790, Jacquard created a prototype machine, but Active participation in the revolutionary events in France did not allow him to continue work on improving his invention. After the revolution, Jacquard continued his design research in a different direction. He invented a machine for weaving nets and in 1801 took it to an exhibition in Paris. There he saw the loom of Jacques de Vaucanson who, as early as 1745, used a perforated roll of paper to control the weaving of threads. What he saw prompted Jacquard to a brilliant idea, which he successfully used in his loom.
To manage each thread individually, Jaccard came up with a punch card and an ingenious mechanism for reading information from it. This made it possible to weave fabrics with patterns predetermined on a punched card. In 1804, Jaccard's invention received a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition, and a corresponding patent was issued to him. The final industrial version of the jacquard loom was ready by 1807.
In 1808, Napoleon I awarded Jacquard a prize of 3,000 francs and the right to a prize of 50 francs from each a machine tool of his design operating in France. By 1812, over ten thousand jacquard looms were in operation in France. In 1819, Jacquard received the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
Joseph Marie Jacquard died in 1834 at the age of 82. In Lyon in 1840 a monument was erected to him. The Jacquard loom made it possible not only to weave fabrics with complex patterns (Jacquard) in an industrial way, but also became the prototype of modern automatic looms.
The Jacquard loom is the first machine to use a punched card in its work.
As early as 1823, the English scientist Charles Babaj tried to build a calculating machine using punched cards. At the end of the 19th century, an American scientist built a computer and processed the results of the 1890 population census on it. Punched cards were used in computers until the middle of the 20th century.