Joseph Marie Jacquard

Joseph Marie Jacquard.

Joseph Marie Charles (July 7, 1752, Lyon, France - August 7, 1834, Oullins, France), known as Joseph Marie Jacquard, was a French weaver and merchant, known for creating the first programmable punch card loom (also his own invention), the Jacquard loom.

Biography

The family name of Joseph Marie Charles was "Jacquard". In his grandfather's generation, various branches of the Charles family lived in the Couzon-Au-Mont d'Or neighborhood of Lyon. In order to distinguish the different branches, the community gave them different nicknames, and this received the name of "Jacquard". Thus, Joseph's grandfather was Bartholomew Charles (called) Jacquard.

Joseph Marie Charles Jacquard was born into a conservative Catholic family on July 7, 1752. He was one of nine children born to Jean Charles Jacquard, a master weaver from Lyons, and his wife, Antoinette Rive. However, only Joseph and his sister Clemenceau (born November 7, 1747) survived to adulthood. Although his father was a property man, Joseph received no formal education and remained illiterate until he was 13 years old. He was eventually tutored by his brother-in-law, Jean-Marie Barrett, who ran a bookselling and printing business. Barrett also introduced Joseph to societies and scholars.At first, Joseph helped his father operate his loom, but the work proved too hard, so Jacquard was placed first with a bookbinder and then with a printer manufacturer.

His mother died in 1762, and when his father died in 1772, Joseph inherited his father's house, looms, and workshop, as well as a vineyard and quarry in Couzon-au-Mont d'Or. In 1778, he listed his occupations as master weaver and silk merchant. Jacquard's profession at this time is problematic because in 1780, most silk weavers did not work independently, but instead they worked for the wages of silk merchants, and Jacquard was not registered as a silk merchant in Lyon.

There is some confusion about the history of the early start in Jacquard's work. British economist Sir John Bowring met Jacquard, who told Bowring that he had previously been a maker of straw hats. Eymard claimed that before he got involved in silk weaving, Jacquard was a typographer (in the sense of being a maker of individual typefaces for printers), a soldier, a straw hat bleacher, and a limeburner b> (a maker of lime for mortar). Barlow claims that before they were married, Jacquard had worked for a bookbinder, a typesetter, and a cutlery maker. After marrying, Jacquard tried cutlery-making and weaving. However, Barlow does not cite any sources for that information.

On July 26, 1778, Joseph married Claudine Boichon. She was a middle-class widow from Lyon who owned property and had a sizeable dowry. However, José soon fell deeply into debt and was taken to court. Barlow claims that after Jacquard's father died, Jacquard started a figure-weaving business, but it failed and he lost all his wealth. To settle his debts, he was forced to sell his inheritance and appropriate his wife's dowry.. Fortunately, his wife maintained a home in Oullins (on the south side of Lyon, along the Rhône River), where the couple resided. The couple had their only child, Jean Marie, on April 19, 1779. Charles Ballot stated that after the Lyons rebellion was suppressed in 1793, Joseph and his son escaped the city by joining the revolutionary army. They fought together in the Rhine campaign of 1795, serving in the Rhône et Loire battalion under General Jean Charles Pichegru. Joseph's son was murdered outside Heidelberg.

In 1800, Joseph began inventing various devices. He invented a treadle loom in 1800, a loom for weaving fishing nets in 1803, and, from 1804, the loom & # 34; Jacquard & # 34; #34;, that would weave patterned silk automatically. But none of these early inventions worked well, so they were not successful.

In 1801, Jacquard exhibited his invention at the Exposition of the Products of French Industry in Paris, where he was awarded a bronze medal. In 1803 he was summoned to Paris, and attached to the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. The loom was declared public property in 1805, and Jacquard was rewarded with a pension and a royalty on each machine. Despite this, the invention of it was fiercely rejected by silk weavers, who feared the introduction of it due to labor savings. However, its advantages ensured its general adoption, and by 1812 there were 11,000 Jacquard looms in use in France. This claim has been disputed: few Jacquard looms were initially sold due to problems with the punch card mechanism. Only after 1815, once Jean Antoine Breton had solved the problems with the punch card mechanism, did loom sales increase.

Jacquard died at Oullins, Rhône, on 7 August 1834. Six years later, a statue of him was erected in Lyon, on the site where his display loom was destroyed in 1801.

The programmable loom

Jacquard's loom.

In 1801 Jacquard invented his famous loom governed by a system of punched cards, he presented it at an industrial exhibition in Lyon in 1805. The invention was based on instruments designed by Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1728) and Jacques Vaucanson (1740), all French. The control was carried out by means of perforations in cards or cardboard tokens, which allowed the passage of the needles that moved the threads, before the passage of the shuttle. The sequence of cards formed a closed loop to allow repetition of the drawing. This system allowed even the most inexperienced user to create complex designs.

The loom itself was not revolutionary, the important thing and the great invention was the perforated card system, which allowed the independent movement of the threads through some ligaments inserted in different areas of the fabric. Each punched card corresponded to a line of the design, the sum of all the cards is what created the pattern. Each perforation was connected to a hook (called a Bolus) that could be placed in two positions, up or down. So depending on the position of the Bolus, the frame made the weft move in one of the two directions, in this way the sequence of raising and lowering the thread created a pattern on the chosen fabric. The hooks could be connected with more than one thread, thus repeating the pattern more than once. His invention aroused much interest in France, in 1812 11,000 units had already been sold in his country and 1,000 more in the rest of Europe.

He radically revolutionized the textile industry, his system allowed the work of several men to be done by just one. And this, clearly, did not please everyone. Initially he suffered rejection from the weavers, even publicly burning one of his looms. But his protest was useless, the revolution could not be stopped. They declared the automatic loom National Heritage and Jacquard received the Legion of Honor medal and an agreement where they agreed to pay the inventor 50 francs for each loom sold.

The method of his loom became the paradigm of the first computing machine, developed by Charles Babbage. It was also used in multiple pieces of equipment and machinery, such as mechanical pianos, known as player pianos, and later in computers from the 40s to the 60s as support for data entry and programs.

Jacquard died in Oullins on August 7, 1834, where he worked as mayor. Six years later, a statue was built in Lyon in his honor, exactly in the place where a group of workers burned a model of his automatic loom.