Joseph Marie Jacquard

Jacquard machine

The Jacquard machine automated textile pattern weaving using replaceable punched cards — each encoding one row — to control warp threads individually. It improved fabric definition by drawing the figuring shed on every shot, not every fourth. It built directly on Bouchon, Falcon and Vaucanson, replaced Vaucanson’s paper strip with Falcon’s card chain by 1805, and was declared public property that year. Its use of external, swappable instructions influenced Babbage and became a conceptual precursor to programming — though it performed no computation, stored no state, and had no logic.