Part 15.  The Other French Revolution.

Welcome back!

In the last part of our journey we discovered how the town clock was turned into the watch, and the carillon was turned into the music box.

Today we continue the story of mechanical music, and this time we’re going to look at how a loom was turned into a computer!

Our story starts in a French textile in Lyon.

Basile Bouchon was a textile worker, and the son of an organ maker.

One of the most tedious and time-consuming parts of the weaving process was setting up the draw loom. Basile most probably was influenced by his father’s mechanical skills, particularly the use of a barrel to program songs. In 1725 Basile had the brilliant idea to use perforated paper tape(holes punched out of them) to control weather or not the chords on the warp of the loom would trigger. This was great lateral thinking as the wooden or metal barrels used in organs were not practical for the weaving process,

This served to partially automate the task, but still required a draw boy to control the operation.

In 1728 Jean Fouchon expanded the number of chords that could be automated and eliminated some mistakes in the lifting of threads by  re-arranging the holes into rows and changing from a paper loop to rectangular paper that could be joined together even to create an endless loop if necessary.

In 1741 the process was improved slightly by Jacques de Vaucanson,

An inventor whom actually deserves his own installment ( soon)

The problem was not solved until 1801 by Joseph Marie Jarcquard (actually formally Joseph Marie Charles).

He was the son of a silk merchant and was boy around 1750, a time when cloth weaving was a big industry especially in Lyon. Jarcuard was made to work at his fathers loom as a drawboy. His job was to sit inside the loom and lift or move the threads depending on his fathers direction, this job meant long time consuming and very tedious hours.

As a boy he did not receive any education and was illiterate until the age of 13, when his brother in law, a printer and book seller both taught him and introduced him to scholars and learned societies.

After dabbling in various unprofitable ventures Jacquard started to toy with loom and weaving inventions, but his revolutionary invention was put on hold, because of the disruption caused by the other one, err, that is the French revolution.

In 1803 his invention was complete, he had created an fully automated system that contary to popular belief was not a new loom but a “head’ that could be attached to pre-existing looms of the time.

He system was one of punch cards and hooks. These think paper cards had holes punched into rows, each row corresponded to a row in the design. The needles and hooks used for the weaving were guided by the holes in the cardboard. When the hooks hit a hole it would pass through the card and with the needle insert a thread.

The simplest of repeating designs would fit onto a single card, the more complex the design the more cards needed. Heavily brocaded materials were often created by shuffling through a whole deck of cards.

Before his invention the amount of time it took to create a complex pattern eliminated most of the profit made on the sale.

Now ordinary workmen could produce beautiful patterns that normally took great skill patience and a lot of work. It sped up manufacturing dramatically and got rid of the need for the draw boy.

His invention was at first fiercely opposed by many silk weavers fearing that his invention would mean they would be out of jobs, in fact Jaquard was almost killed by an angry mob and many of his looms were destroyed. (remember this is not long after the revolution)

However Nepoleon thought his invention was marvelous, declared the Jaquard loom (or head) public property, gave Jacquard a pension and a royalty on each machine created.

He must have died a rich man, because by 1812, it is reported that an estimated 11,000 looms were working in France.

Punch cards were a revolutionary way to store information, and to retrieve information in the form of a sequence of operations.

Eccentric English mathematician Charles Babbage, would later use this idea as part of his designs for his analytical engine (1837-71)  now known as the direct precursor to the modern computer.

In 1890 a statistician named Herman Hollerith used punch cards to organize and sort his data from the 1890 U.S Census. His company would eventually become IBM, whom famously used punch cards in much of it’s programming and data storage work in early computers.

But it is for the revolution that was created in the music industry that is the main reason we include him today.

To find out just how this changed how we listened to music click here for part 16.

But before you do have a close look at this image!

It’s  portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard our hero from the above story..

What makes it truly incredible is that is actually a woven piece of silk 85 x 66cm and was created by the weaver Michel-Marie Carquillat, at Lyon, France in 1839.
The image also incudes Michel-Marie’s name and caption.

As the historyofscience.com reports

“This image, of which only about six examples are known, was woven on the Jacquard loom using 24,000 Jacquard cards, each of which had over 1000 hole positions. The process of mis en carte, or converting the image details to punched cards for the Jacquard mechanism, for this exceptionally large and detailed image, would have taken several workers many months, as the woven image convincingly portrays superfine elements such as a translucent curtain over glass window panes. Once all the “programming” was completed, the process of weaving the image with its 24,000 punched cards would have taken more than eight hours, assuming that the weaver was working at the usual Jacquard loom speed of about forty-eight picks per minute, or about 2800 per hour. More than once this woven image was mistaken for an engraved image. The image was produced only to order, most likely in an exceptionally small number of examples. The only recorded examples are those in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Science Museum, London, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.”

Wow!!!!

Ready for the next chapter?  CLICK HERE FOR PART 16

CLICK HERE for the previous chapter

CLICK HERE for the INDEX of History Of Electronic Music