Jacquards' Web Read Free

woven in Lyons in 1838 by a weaving firm named Didier Petit & Co. It was based on an oil portrait of Jacquard originally painted by a Lyons artist, Claude Bonnefond, at the time the director of the City’s school of Fine Arts. Bonnefond took care to give the punched cards a prominent place in the portrait.
    A few originals of the woven portrait still exist today. There is one in the reserve collection of the Science Museum in London, although unfortunately the portrait is no longer on general display, for the Museum has temporarily slimmed down its history of computing exhibition as a preparatory step to planning a major new display on computing and communications. However, you can ask for permission to view the Jacquard portrait in the reserve collection.
    As you gaze into Jacquard’s stern features, it is difficult to believe that this faded, rather small picture (it only measures 20
    by 14 inches), can be an illustration of a technology, developed more than two centuries ago, that was to alter our world beyond recognition.
    Yet who exactly was Joseph-Marie Jacquard? How did he come to invent a loom that could weave pictures? And how did his extraordinary idea lead to the global information revolution that is continuing to transform the world in which we live today?
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    A better mousetrap
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    To call forth figures, flowers, or patterns of any other kind, different means are necessary.
    Dionysius Lardner,
    A Treatise on the Silk Manufacture, 1831
    Our story begins with the discovery of silk. And, according to legend, the story of silk begins with a cup of tea.
    One afternoon, sometime around the year 2700 bc , the Chinese empress Si Ling-Chi was strolling around her garden. She chanced to pick a fuzzy white cocoon from her favourite mulberry tree. Taking it over to her tea-table, she started toying with it. Her fingers were clumsy; a moment later she accidentally dropped it into her hot cup of tea. Fishing it out, she discovered to her surprise that she could pull out a long strand of thread from the cocoon. She pulled and pulled; the strand grew longer and longer.
    Si Ling-Chi had discovered silk. A natural fibre produced by most spiders and by many caterpillars, silk is created in particular abundance and strength by the silkworm, which is really a caterpillar and whose diet consists almost entirely of mulberry leaves.
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    Jacquard’s Web
    Whether this story of the origin of silk is literally true or a myth concocted to flatter the empress does not really matter.
    What is certain is that the properties of silk, and the secrets of its production, were first discovered in China about three thousand years ago.
    Astonishingly, the average silkworm cocoon contains a single thread of silk that when fully unwound is often as much as a full kilometre in length. The discovery of silk, and the revelation that numerous threads could be unrolled from a cocoon, spun into a stronger thread and used to make a fabric, caused a sensation.
    Never before had anyone known of a fabric so soft, strong, durable, as readily dyed, and yet so dirt-resistant. Silk appeared the ultimate luxury. Indeed, it almost seemed a minor