Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderFact

The Jacquard machine, patented by the French weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard in 1804, read weaving patterns from a chain of punched cards. Changing the cards changed the pattern, an idea that later shaped the first computers.

Joseph-Marie Jacquard, 1804

TechnologyHistory

The story behind the card

Before Jacquard, patterned silk was woven on a draw loom, where an assistant, often a boy, lifted the right threads by hand for every row: slow and tiring work. Jacquard, from Lyon, built on earlier devices by Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1728) and Jacques de Vaucanson (1740). Each card stood for one row of the design: where there was a hole, a thread was lifted; where there was none, it stayed down. In 1839 a silk portrait of Jacquard was woven using about 24,000 cards. Charles Babbage owned one of these portraits and planned to program his Analytical Engine with punched cards, and in 1890 Herman Hollerith used machines that read punched cards to count the United States census.

Türkçe oku
Jakar makinesi, dokunacak deseni birbirine bağlı delikli kartlardan okuyordu. Makinenin patentini 1804'te Fransız dokumacı Joseph-Marie Jacquard aldı. Kartlar değişince desen de değişiyordu; bu fikir daha sonra ilk bilgisayarlara yol gösterdi.

Jacquard'dan önce desenli ipek kumaşlar çekme tezgâhında dokunurdu. Her sıra için gereken iplikleri dokumacının yanındaki bir yardımcı, çoğu zaman bir çocuk, elle kaldırırdı; iş yavaş ve yorucuydu. Lyonlu Jacquard, Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1728) ve Jacques de Vaucanson'un (1740) daha önceki buluşlarını geliştirdi. Makinede her kart desenin bir sırasına karşılık geliyordu: Delik olan yerde iplik kalkıyor, delik olmayan yerde aşağıda kalıyordu. 1839'da Jacquard'ın ipek bir portresi yaklaşık 24.000 kartla dokundu. Charles Babbage bu portrelerden birine sahipti ve Analitik Makine'sini delikli kartlarla programlamayı planladı. Herman Hollerith de 1890 ABD nüfus sayımının verilerini delikli kartları okuyan makinelerle saydı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Jacquard machine
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

When Neil Armstrong radioed “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” on 20 July 1969, his words reached Earth about 1.3 seconds later. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and the Moon is about 384,000 km (239,000 miles) away.

Eagle was the lunar module that carried Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the surface. Light, and so radio, travels at almost 300,000 km per second. At the Moon's average distance of about 384,400 km, a signal takes roughly 1.28 seconds each way, so every exchange with Mission Control in Houston had a built-in pause of about 2.6 seconds before an answer could arrive. Large dish antennas at Goldstone in California and at Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes in Australia picked up the signals; the clearest pictures of the first steps came through Australia and were watched live by an estimated 600 million people. Before leaving, the crew set up a panel of reflectors on the surface. Scientists still fire lasers at it and time the light's return, which is how we know the Moon is drifting away from Earth by about 3.8 cm a year.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderTechnology

The Apollo Guidance Computer that steered astronauts to the Moon had about 4 kilobytes of rewritable memory and 72 kilobytes of permanent memory. Its programs were woven by hand into “rope memory”: a wire threaded through a tiny magnetic ring stored a 1, and a wire passing it by stored a 0.

Designed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and built by Raytheon, the computer was one of the first to use silicon chips (integrated circuits) and fitted into about 28 litres. Its memory was counted in “words” of 16 bits, or binary digits: 2,048 rewritable and 36,864 permanent. During Apollo 11's descent on 20 July 1969 it flashed 1202 and 1201 alarms: a radar left on in case the landing had to be abandoned was stealing processing time and overloading it. Its operating system, designed by J. Halcombe Laning, dropped less urgent jobs and restarted in a moment while the landing programs kept running, so Mission Control told the crew to carry on. The flight software was written by a team led by Margaret Hamilton, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. Its power was similar to that of the first home computers of the late 1970s.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderTechnology

The Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek geared device probably made in the 2nd century BC, had a spiral dial covering 223 lunar months for predicting eclipses. Symbols on the dial marked the months when an eclipse of the Sun or Moon was expected, and inscriptions gave details such as the hour.

Sponge divers found the mechanism in 1901, a corroded lump among treasures from a Roman-era ship that sank off the Greek island of Antikythera around 70 to 60 BC. Its hand-turned bronze gears modelled the movements of the Sun and Moon, and it is called the oldest known analogue computer, a machine that calculates with moving parts rather than digits. The eclipse dial follows the Saros cycle: after 223 lunar months (new moon to new moon), about 18 years and 11 days, the Sun, Earth and Moon return to almost the same positions, so eclipses repeat in a similar pattern. Symbols in 51 of the dial's cells mark 38 lunar and 27 solar eclipses. Much of this was read only in the 2000s, when researchers including Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth used X-ray scans to see inside the fragments. The front, which probably showed the planets, is largely lost.

Antikythera Mechanism Research Project / NatureRead card
WonderTechnology

Paper money was first used in China. In the early 11th century, merchants in Sichuan began issuing paper notes called jiaozi in place of heavy iron coins, and in 1023 the Song government took over issuing them. Europe's first banknotes appeared in Sweden in 1661.

The idea had roots in the Tang dynasty (618–907): by 804, merchants were using “flying cash”, paper certificates that let them move money across China without carrying coins. In Sichuan, where iron coins were too heavy for large payments, private firms in the regional capital, Chengdu, began issuing jiaozi notes. When some issuers went bankrupt, the state set up its own office in 1023 and printed the first government notes the following year. Paper money rested on trust: a note was worth only what its issuer promised. That trust could be abused, and when the Song printed far more notes than they could back with coins, prices soared. Europeans learnt of paper money from travellers such as Marco Polo, who described the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan's notes in the 13th century. Europe's first banknotes came from Stockholms Banco in 1661; the bank failed six years later.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderTechnology

The magnetic compass began in China as a tool for fortune-telling and geomancy, the art of siting houses and tombs in harmony with the land. The first records of Chinese sailors steering by a magnetised needle date from the early 12th century.

The first Chinese direction-finders were probably “south-pointing spoons” made of lodestone, a naturally magnetic iron ore. Placed on a smooth bronze board marked with directions, the spoon turned until its handle pointed south. Texts from the Han dynasty (206 BC to AD 220) appear to describe such devices, although archaeologists have not yet found one. The big step came under the Song dynasty. In 1088 the scholar Shen Kuo described needles magnetised by rubbing them on lodestone, and noticed that they do not point exactly north-south, the effect now called magnetic declination. A few decades later the writer Zhu Yu recorded that sailors steered by the stars at night and the sun by day, and turned to the south-pointing needle when the sky was overcast. In Europe, the first written mention of a compass dates from about 1190.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Next card in the archiveCharles Babbage's Difference Engine, first shown as a small model in 1822, was a mechanical calculator for producing mathematical tables without human error. His Analytical Engine, designed from the mid-1830s, went further: a machine that could be programmed with punched cards to carry out any calculation.Read next →