Mechanical organs and things might have stayed just that if it hadn't been for another craze
sweeping Europe, a mania for Chinese fashion, particularly in dress, when, at the beginning of
the 18th century, very complicated patterns became all the rage, especially in France
and, particularly, in silk. By the beginning of the 18th century, the
demand for this kind of pattern was giving the silk weavers of Lyon a real headache,
because silk weaving isn't just a simple over and under business of ordinary weaving. It's
much more complicated. I mean, take a look at this.
This already complicated pattern, if you follow it across, there you see suddenly, for about
five threads, that particular orange. So it comes in at, say, thread 530 and it disappears
at thread 535. Now, if you get that one thread wrong, you've
blown it. Let me show you on this little model loom
here how they cracked that problem. Every thread runs through a tiny ring on a
cord, so if you want to lift the thread, you pull the cord up, the thread lifts, and, in
this case, the crossing thread would go underneath and in the final pattern not be seen.
Now, if you tie together all the cords for all the threads you want to lift, into one
bunch, then one pull will lift them all, like this.
Now in a complicated pattern, there would be a lot of those cords to pull, and the children
whose job it was to do it would get tired and pull the wrong cords and maybe ruin a
week's work. So in 1725, a Lyonese weaver call Basile Bouchon
solved the problem because his father was an organ builder.
His father used these for his automated organ. Remember the organ? He used the same cylinder
with pegs in it to make music as they'd used in Belgium to work their bell ringing
carillon. And they's originally got that idea from the
cams set on the shaft of the paper mill. Bouchon saw that the piece of paper you give to the
carpenter to tell where to put these pegs on the cylinder was in fact a kind of control
mechanism, so he put it on a loom. Look, each control cord comes over and down
here and, whether or not it's moved, depends on this horizontal needle here.
Okay, now, for the control mechanism part. What Basile Bouchon did was put a roll of perforated
paper up against the needles, the cross needles, and where there was a hole, the needle stayed
put, because they came through the hole. And where there was not a hole, as in the case
of these four needles here, the paper pushed the cross needles, so that all four needles
and all their threads operated simultaneously, like this.
And to change the pattern, you simply move the paper along one row of holes.
But the paper tore, and the weavers placed it in the wrong position so, around 1740,
another weaver from Lyon called Falcon, came up with this idea. He put each pattern on
a separate card. Now the card is more durable, and you couldn't really mistake how you should
position it. Around 1750, one of the greatest machine makers
of all time, a man called Vaucanson, who was also the inspector for silk factories, automated
the entire process. He put the perforated roll around a cylinder,
and mounted the cylinder on a chassis that went backwards and forwards on water power,
like this. And as it did so, it clicked forward one row
of holes automatically each time. Now, that was limited to how much paper you
could put round the cylinder, and it put men out of work.
So, for nearly 50 years, this loom moldered unnoticed here in the Paris Museum of Arts and
Crafts, until just after 1800, another weaver who happened to be here at the time, was asked
to put it together. And in doing so, he made a few changes. He
put Vaucanson 's idea together with Bouchon's cards, and came up with this.
It's automated, and it has the advantage of if you want to increase the pattern, you simple
add more cards. Now for that minor amendment , he got all
the glory, because to this day, the entire concept is named after this man. This is a
Jacquard loom, and boy, what a success that was.
Well, not in France, because the Revolutionaries decided that they didn't like fancy aristocratic
patterns. But in England, where the loom ended up making things like paisley shawls very
popular, and where these cards got picked up for a very different reason. They got used
to control automatic riveting machines that, by the mid-19th century, helped to build the
great new iron ships, that were to make the crossing of the Atlantic safer and faster.