Joseph Marie Jacquard (nonfiction)

This portrait of Jacquard was woven in silk on a Jacquard loom and required 24,000 punched cards to create (1839). It was only produced to order. One of these portraits in the possession of Charles Babbage inspired him in using perforated cards in his analytical engine. It is in the collection of the Science Museum in London, England.

Joseph Marie Charles dit (called or nicknamed) Jacquard (7 July 1752 – 7 August 1834) was a French weaver and merchant.

He played an important role in the development of the earliest programmable loom -- the Jacquard loom -- which in turn played an important role in the development of other programmable machines, such as an early version of digital compiler used by IBM to develop the modern day computer.

In the News

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  Ishango bone used as shuttle in Jacquard loom, computes floating point numbers.

Fiction cross-reference

• Charles Babbage -
• Forbidden Ratio - Supervillain with grudge against all things computational, including Jacquard looms.
• Herman Hollerith - "the Card Man", "the Ticketologist", etc.

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Charles Babbage (nonfiction)
• Computation (nonfiction)
• Computer science (nonfiction)
• Herman Hollerith (nonfiction)
• Jacquard loom (nonfiction)

External links:

• Joseph Marie Jacquard @ Wikipedia