Authors: James Essinger
And there was even more at stake than this. A successful new silk-weaving loom would also represent one of the few instances during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when French technological innovation would have won a resounding victory over its British counterpart.
30
The Emperor’s new clothes
It was lucky for Jacquard in particular and for French industry generally that Napoleon had been fascinated by the silk industry all his life. When the future Emperor was a boy, his father had actually formulated plans to plant mulberries in Corsica as the basis for a Corsican silk industry and had very nearly managed to win a substantial government grant to do this. Napoleon was entirely aware of the importance of silk in the French economy, and was always ready to take steps to protect and advance the industry. On several occasions—both as First Consul and as Emperor—he visited Lyons, a city he loved, and gave speeches to inspire the city’s industrial and commercial communities. He was always received in Lyons as a hero. The people of Lyons, like most of the French population, regarded Napoleon as the saviour of the nation: the great leader who had put an end to the disorder and violent chaos of the Revolution.
Even if Jacquard was indeed inspired in his work by Napoleon and the new society the Emperor was creating, making the leap from poor and emotionally traumatized artisan to hugely successful inventor must have been a struggle of epic proportions. It is not known exactly how Jacquard was supporting himself in
1799
and
1800
; possibly he was again working at a variety of menial jobs. At this crucial stage of his life, and in the total absence of any reliable original sources that would satisfy modern scholars, there is little choice but to suppose that the assertions of a few nineteenth-century writers, whose work is based on hearsay, were close to the truth. This is that while Jacquard was spending his days struggling to earn enough money to buy bread for himself and Claudine, he was devoting his evenings and nights, as far as time permitted, to studying loom-making truly seriously for the first time in his life.
Jacquard must have initiated his career as an inventor with a minimum of financial and practical resources and with very little to sustain him other than the conviction that he could attain his great goal and that this goal was infinitely worth achieving. He refined his skills by making a variety of types of loom, but was 31
Jacquard’s Web
always aware of the loom he really wanted to build—a revolutionary new machine for weaving pictures into silk brocade.
Soon he began constructing a prototype of the machine, carving the pulleys and other components himself.
Living within a community of weavers that was itself literally a tightly woven group which greatly enjoyed gossip, the story of what Jacquard was doing started to get about. Jacquard’s innate talent as a craftsman and inventor made people with money think that here was a man who stood a fair chance of succeeding in a task that had been the dream of silk-weavers for more than a century. Master-weavers and merchants with cash to spare went to see Jacquard. They offered him various arrangements under which he would make his new brocade loom—assuming he could get it to work—available to them at a favourable price in exchange for immediate financial assistance upfront.
For the investors the deals must have been risky. There were, in fact, numerous would-be inventors tinkering with ideas for a mechanical drawloom. Prototypes had been developed for three or four decades, but none of them had come anywhere near fulfilling their inventors’ expectations.
Most of these inventors possessed more ambition than inventive capability. Almost all of them were short of cash and desperate for patronage. But perhaps there was something particularly convincing about Jacquard’s plans and approach that made him especially prone to attract support from prosperous master-weavers and dealers in silk fabric. These people were only too aware of how much their own profits would be boosted if he were successful.
If Jacquard did have patrons who invested in his labours, they did not have to wait long before seeing results. Once he started his work as an inventor, his genius for it became apparent almost at once.
The patent he took out on
23
December
1800
is registered in Lyons’s municipal archives as being for a machine ‘designed to replace the draw-boy in the manufacture of figured fabrics’. This 32
The Emperor’s new clothes
loom, his first, can be seen as a kind of preliminary step on the way to achieving his grand objective. It could weave simple images into fabric by means of foot-treadles, with a limited number of treadles being used to produce small geometrical or floral designs that were highly prized for use in fabric in making men’s waistcoats or women’s dresses. These fabrics had been popular under the reign of King Louis XVI. They were now coming back into fashion, for an élite class was once again emerging in French society: its privileged status now based on practical achievement rather than on birth and inheritance.
Jacquard continued to work hard on developing other prototypes. He presented his treadle-loom at the second exhibition of French industry in Paris in
1801
. These exhibitions had been instituted by Napoleon, further evidence of his conviction that it was as important for France to rise to pre-eminence in the physical sciences and in industry as it was to be supreme on the battle-field.
Jacquard’s treadle-loom was received at the exhibition with immense interest. From this point on his reputation started to grow quickly. Even for this first loom, he was rewarded with a bronze medal for technical achievement. This was handed over to him personally on
25
September
1801
by the Minister of the Interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal. It was Jacquard’s first-ever official recognition by the Government.
While continuing to work on his most ambitious loom of all, he enjoyed another diversion. In
1802
, the French Society for the Furtherance of National Industry had sponsored a prize for a loom for making fishing nets. Jacquard designed a new kind of loom for this purpose. The loom was a great success, and the Society for the Furtherance of National Industry invited him to visit Paris in August
1803
at its own expense to honour him with an award for his work.
This was Jacquard’s first opportunity to meet the talented mathematician, scientist, and logistics expert Lazare Carnot.
Carnot’s French nickname
L’Organisateur de la Victoire
(‘The 33
Jacquard’s Web
Organizer of the Victory’) showed the enormous esteem in which he was held. Carnot, fascinated all his life by science and new inventions, had taken a keen interest in the Society for the Furtherance of National Industry. A huge, bull-like man, he had expressed a wish to meet the inventor from Lyons who was rapidly building a reputation as a brilliant designer of looms.
Carnot’s nickname derived from a terrifying moment in his career in May
1795
, during the last years of the Revolution. He had found himself in a severely compromised position when an obscure deputy suddenly demanded the arrest of all the members of the Committee of Public Safety, a Revolutionary body that had been discredited and of which Carnot had been a member. ‘Not guilty’ was rarely a verdict to which Revolutionary courts were partial, and being arrested all too often resulted in a visit to the guillotine, and a short, sharp shock. There were a desperately tense few minutes when it seemed possible that the moment of Carnot’s downfall might have come.
But Carnot was saved by another deputy springing to his defence and suddenly exclaiming ‘He organized the victory!’
This was a reference to the crucial role Carnot played in organizing the logistics behind the Revolutionary army’s successes.
General cheering broke out. That cheering saved Carnot’s life.
He was never in such mortal danger again.
When Carnot and Jacquard met, the great ebullient hero of the Revolution was immensely impressed with the modest, thoughtful, softly speaking inventor from Lyons. Jacquard, at fifty-one, was just ten months older than Carnot. The fact that Jacquard had fought bravely in the Revolutionary army (his counter-Revolutionary activities were either not known about or ignored) and that his son had died fighting for France, greatly endeared him to the Organizer of the Victory. Carnot presented Jacquard with the prize from the Society for his fishing-net loom.
At today’s prices the
1000
francs Jacquard won were worth about
£
20 000
($
32 000
). His days of penury were over and he returned to Lyons a hero.
34
The Emperor’s new clothes
In
1804
, the same year Napoleon crowned himself Emperor at Nôtre-Dame in Paris, Jacquard finally patented his loom for weaving brocade using punched cards to control the action of the warp threads and therefore to control every row of weaving. The success of this loom was evident from the beginning. Its effect on the French silk industry was immediate, enormous, and extraordinary.
With his enormous mechanical talent, Jacquard easily saw that the problem with the drawloom was that it did not really solve in any constructive sense the problem of how to rapidly raise and lower the warp threads to form the shed when a decorated fabric was being woven. As we have seen, the drawloom was really nothing more than an
aid
to the weaving process, just as an abacus is a helpful manual aid to calculation but not a calculating machine.
By the time Jacquard began applying himself to solving the problem, the world of machinery had advanced considerably even compared with fifty years earlier. The time was ripe for a mechanical solution to a problem that had, in a sense, bedevilled the Lyons weaving industry since its foundation.
What made the solution possible were punched cards.
The idea was this: each punched card would be pressed once against the back of an array of small, narrow, circular metal rods.
Each individual rod would control the action of one weighted string that would in turn govern one individual warp thread. If the tip of the rod in question encountered solid cardboard when pressed against the card, the rod would not move and the warp thread it controlled would stay where it was. On the other hand,
if the tip of the rod in question encountered a hole in the punched card,
then the tip of that rod would pass through the hole and the individual
warp thread controlled by that particular rod would be raised.
The crucial point to understand is that the precise array of raised or stationary rods (and corresponding raised or stationary 35
Jacquard’s Web
warp threads)
could be different for every single line of weaving.
Each punched card controlled the raising of the warp threads for a particular colour of weft thread in a row of weaving. Cards could be used more than once in the same row when the design required repetition. The punched cards would all need to be processed in precisely the right sequence. But the beauty of this system was that
once all the punched cards had been made and strung together in the
right sequence, that chain of punched cards would always produce the
same design.
Jacquard has gone down in history as the inventor of the punched-card loom for weaving silk brocade, but in fact it was not Jacquard who first had the idea of using punched cards in this way.
Some sources attribute the original idea to a weaver with the sur-name Falcon, who in
1728
built a loom that did use large punched cards. It is not clear what Falcon’s first name was. Some sources say Louis and others Jean. There is no way of being sure which is the right one, or perhaps he used them both. In many respects Falcon’s very obscurity attests to the inadequacy of his loom.
Falcon’s process was hopelessly slow and never got beyond the prototype stage. His cards were clumsily made and unreliable. But the biggest problem with the Falcon was that his loom was not
automatic
. Instead, it required the drawloom’s draw-boy to press the punched card against the rods controlling the warp thread governors every time a row of stitches was required. The Falcon loom was not a
machine
at all. De Vaucanson’s loom
was
a machine, but an expensive and not very practical one.
Jacquard brought all the ideas together, refined the technology, and solved all the practical problems to create a loom that was a true world-beater. He saw that the way ahead would indeed be through the use of punched cards. These, unlike the de Vaucanson cylinders, enabled the sequence of weaving instructions to be as long as the weaver desired. The portrait of Jacquard which Charles Babbage showed at his soirées required, as we have seen, a total of
24 000
punched cards to be employed when 36
The Emperor’s new clothes
it was being woven. In fact, the woven picture of Jacquard was an exceptionally complex image. It was not a commercial proposition but a special production to show how remarkable Jacquard’s loom really was. The usual total of cards required for even the most sophisticated commercial woven fabric on a Jacquard loom was in the vicinity of
4000
.
Jacquard’s work illustrates an important principle of great inventions: they are rarely ideas plucked out of the air, but more often than not build on previous attempts to make a key breakthrough. The inventions that go down in history bring to those attempts a level of insight, technical mastery, and sheer genius that allows the invention to be successful. The perforated or punched card is now associated with Jacquard, not Falcon, because Jacquard made a machine that worked properly. In any case, most likely even Falcon did not originate the idea of the punched card; its origins probably lie in the obscurity of history.
Invention is a harsh science, and the successful completion of a working machine or device that provides the benefits it is supposed to provide is more important than priority of concept, which may in any case be impossible to ascertain.