Jacquards' Web (3 page)

This is no coincidence: the writing of history and fabric-making both require a considerable sophistication of civilization.

The first plant used for cloth was flax, still employed extensively today to make linen. The earliest surviving fragments of linen are found in Egypt. They were made there in about
4500 bc
.

The production of linen depended on a major new invention: weaving.

Weaving is the interlacing of two or more sets of strands of fibre at right angles to each other to form a useful material. It’s a simple process when rigid fibres such as reeds are being used. In this case, as anyone who has done raffia work will know, the weaving can easily be undertaken manually. But rigid fibres don’t make comfortable clothing: this needs to be produced from soft, flexible yarns and can only be woven in a neat and convenient way by making use of a loom.

A loom is designed to hold a set of parallel threads laid out flat —known as the warp—so that they do not tangle. The loom must also facilitate the weaving process by allowing another set of threads—the weft—to be interlaced with this warp. Most looms only have a few basic parts. Usually one end of the warp is tied to a
warp beam
(also known as the back beam or warp bar) while the other end is fastened to the
cloth beam
(also known as the front beam) on which the finished fabric can be rolled.

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Jacquard’s Web

This kind of hand-loom is well-suited to weaving plain, undecorated fabric, but it cannot weave more ambitious kinds of fabrics that contain large, complex patterns or—most ambitious of all —
images
. These are known as
decorated
fabrics and can only be woven by a loom that allows the raising and lowering of individual warp threads to permit the different coloured weft threads to be inserted by the shuttle in such a way that a design can be created in the fabric.

The first loom that made it possible to create a pattern in fabric was called a
drawloom
because the loom allowed the warp threads to be
drawn
up individually to 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 expensive, imprac-tical, and a bit silly. After all, by the time you have built your lily-weaving loom, lilies, too, might have gone out of fashion. And even when lilies come back into fashion, the designs popular last time round may not be popular now.

In practice, making a machine that is dedicated to carrying out only one very specific set of complex procedures makes little sense unless you can be
absolutely certain
there will be an indefinite and extensive demand for what that machine can produce.

And even if there is, offering the user
flexibility
in what the machine can do is probably a much better idea.

12

A better mousetrap

Joseph-Marie Jacquard never had any doubt that the only way of solving the problem of inadequacies of the drawloom was to build a new kind of loom that could be instructed to weave any design at all. The challenge he faced was to find a way to convey the instructions of what to weave to the loom.

‘Make a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.’ This saying, attributed to the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, neatly summarizes the eventual success of Jacquard’s quest.

Jacquard’s attempt to improve on the drawloom was, in effect, his bid to invent a better mousetrap. His mechanical genius and stubborn persistence were the catalysts he needed.

But just as William Shakespeare might never have become a great poet and playwright without the wonderful stimulation and energy of Renaissance London all around him, Jacquard would most likely never have blossomed as an inventor had he not lived in Lyons, in his day the silk-weaving capital of the world.

With a population today of
415 000
, Lyons is France’s second most heavily populated city after Paris. Ever since Roman times the city has been proud of being second only to the French capital in prosperity, the richness of its cultural life and the ingenuity of its citizens.

Lyons is situated on a confluence of the Rhône and Saône rivers. These divide Lyons in a roughly north–south direction, rather like the twin prongs of a tuning-fork, with the Saône on the west, and the Rhône on the east. Old Lyons lies on the west bank of the Saône. On the other side of this river is a long tongue of land called La Presqu’île, bordered on the east by the Rhône.

There is a high plateau at the northernmost extremity of La Presqu’île known as Croix Rousse.

During the Renaissance of the fifteenth century, Lyons experienced a period of economic prosperity and intellectual brilliance. In
1464
, the city held the first of many commercial 13

Jacquard’s Web

fairs; a development spurred by the recent arrival in the city of Italian merchant bankers. The families who dominated Lyons at this time started to acquire great fortunes from a near-monopoly of the money-lending business. These banker families stimulated trade in both their professional and personal capacities. They extended credit and spent lavishly on establishing and maintain-ing their lifestyles. New types of crafts developed; foreigners poured into the city. Three other enormous trade fairs were held in Lyons during the fifteenth century.

By the sixteenth century, France’s monarchs had started to eye Italy as a target for annexation. They began to make extended visits to Lyons, a city much closer to the Italian border than Paris.

They were invariably accompanied by hundreds of courtiers, chefs, doctors, hairdressers, mistresses, nobles, and other servants and hangers-on who comprised their entourage. During the sixteenth century Lyons received twenty such protracted royal missions. It was now truly a Royal City as well as a wealthy one.

Its municipal pride had never been greater.

Kings, queens, and others of noble blood thought linen and cotton perfectly good enough for their lowly-born subjects, but absolutely unacceptable to elevated people such as themselves.

For
them
, what other fabric could be suitable but the king of fabrics: silk? And there was only one way of producing the fabulously ornate damasks, satins, taffetas, brocades, and lampas (a patterned silk that imitated Indian painted and dyed textiles) which France’s royalty and aristocracy took for granted much as we take cotton for granted today.
Every pick
of the deliciously soft, heavy, decorated silks that clothed their privileged forms during the day, kept them warm during the night, blocked out the disruptive sunlight in their bedrooms, or glorified the walls of their palaces, had to be woven laboriously on a drawloom by a master-weaver and an assistant perched precariously on top of the archaic mechanism.

The introduction of silk production and silk-weaving into France had been initiated by the French king Louis XI, who held 14

A better mousetrap

the throne from
1461
to
1483
. In
1480
he offered expert silk-workers from Genoa, Florence, and Venice valuable incentives to come and ply their trade in the French city of Tours, in the Loire valley. Louis’s initiative to found a silk-making industry at Tours was a success, but the French silk industry remained confined there until the reign of François I, King from
1515
to
1547
.

Why was Louis so eager to create an indigenous silk industry?

One reason was selfish: he loved silk and wanted to secure his own supply of it. But he had an altruistic reason, too. The silk industry was the world’s first luxury business, and experience showed that silk production and silk-weaving always brought prosperity to any region where they were practised.

In
1515
, François I ascended the French throne. A man who adored conquest, he wasted no time in launching an invasion of Italy. There, he defeated the Duke of Milan, whose army was no match for his French adversaries. After this victory, France owned the Duchy of Milan for fourteen years. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the invasion, it certainly played a key role in developing the French silk industry. François loved silk even more than Louis had. The new king did his utmost to encourage expert Italian silk-workers to set up shop in Lyons. The king personally supervised the development of a silk industry there, making regular visits, offering awards and incentives for successful production and setting up guilds that initiated high standards of professional attainment. Silk-making and silk-weaving spread to other French cities as well as Lyons, but none of them achieved the prominence of the Lyons silk industry.

No one doubted that the second city of France was the perfect place to nurture the country’s home-grown silk industry. It was a city the French kings adored, as much because of its warm climate and great beauty as because of its proximity to the coveted duchies and cities of Italy. French royalty could live in Lyons with all the comforts of court while planning their next campaign.

And as well as the royal court, there were many noblemen and wealthy people in Lyons who formed a ready market for quality 15

Jacquard’s Web

silk fabrics. The city also had a skilled, comparatively well-educated workforce accustomed to working long hours in well-organized weaving studios.