Jacquards' Web Read Free Page B

create the design to be woven. The raising of the warp threads forms what is known as the ‘shed’: the opening made between the threads of the warp to allow the loom’s shuttle to pass through.
    The first drawloom was invented in China in or around the second century bc . It is no surprise that the original invention of the drawloom should have taken place in China, for the extreme fineness and flexibility of silk fabric makes it ideal for having images woven into it. In such designs the individual silk threads, compacted together by the weaver using a comb-like device, are so fine that they cannot be individually distinguished. The emerging woven fabric containing the design is wound round the cloth beam like a rolled up oil painting.
    But the drawloom, while ingenious, was in fact a highly unsatisfactory apparatus. The big problem was that the arrangement of the individual warp threads was usually different for every single row of weaving. In practice, the more detailed the pattern or image, the more different the arrangement of threads was likely to be for each row. This meant that the drawloom operators had to make decisions on a row-by-row basis about whether an individual warp thread should be raised, or kept in its lowered position. There could easily be up to 20
    00 warp threads in a single row of weav-
    ing, and while some of these could usually be lifted en masse , the job of working a drawloom always required incredible meticulousness, as did setting the loom up in the first place—the weaver 10

    A better mousetrap
    A drawloom.
    who operated the shuttle, and the ‘draw-boy’ (typically a boy or a young man)—who raised or lowered the warp. In the early Chinese drawlooms the draw-boy stood on top of the loom but in French drawlooms he would stand on the floor by the weaver. As for the rate of production possible on the drawloom, even the most experienced two-man drawloom teams could only manage a couple of rows of woven fabric each minute. (These rows are known by weavers as ‘picks’.) When we consider the meticulousness of the job, it is surprising the duo could even work as fast as this.
    The drawloom is really only a bit-part character in Jacquard’s Web. But it was precisely because the drawloom was so madden-ingly slow and tedious to use that Joseph-Marie Jacquard was inspired to invent something better.
    What Jacquard set out to do was fundamentally simple. His goal was to revolutionize the speed with which the silk-weavers 11
    Jacquard’s Web
    of his home town, the great French city of Lyons, could create the most beautiful decorated silk fabrics the world had ever seen.
    To achieve this objective, he had to invent a completely new kind of machine: a loom that was capable of being programmed.
    The loom would need to be made so that it could weave one particular image, and then, having been given different instructions, be capable of weaving a completely different image.
    Of course, another way of achieving the same objective would have been to build a different loom for every different design the weaver wanted to weave. For example, if pictures of roses were popular this month Jacquard might have tried to build a loom that only wove roses. The loom would have had to contain inside its mechanism all the instructions for weaving a rose. Such a loom would, in effect, have been a ‘dedicated’ rose-weaving loom. The concept of a machine devoted to a particular task would have been familiar to Jacquard from his knowledge of the machines fostered by the great Industrial Revolution that was happening in Britain.
    But Jacquard, whose father had been a master silk-weaver in Lyons, was only too aware that the problem with building a loom dedicated to weaving, say, an image of a rose is simply this: what do you do when roses go out of fashion?
    Well, of course you could build another loom, one dedicated, for example, to weaving pictures of a lily or of a Lyons skyscape. But managing matters in this way is