Jacquard loom

A loom that uses punched cards to control which warp threads rise during weaving, enabling complex fabric patterns to be reproduced automatically.

Punched card: A stiff card whose holes encode information for a machine to read. The loom reads holes in successive cards to select warp threads for each row.
Joseph-Marie Jacquard: A French inventor whose loom mechanism used punched cards to automate the selection of warp threads. His name became attached to the loom after its adoption in the French silk industry.
Brocade: A richly figured fabric in which supplementary threads create raised patterns, often metallic in appearance. Jacquard looms made elaborate brocade designs easier to weave repeatedly.
Industrial Revolution: A period of major economic and technological transformation beginning in Britain in the eighteenth century. The Jacquard loom became one of the influential machines associated with industrial textile production.
Dobby loom: A loom that uses a mechanical dobby mechanism to raise selected groups of warp threads. A dobby controls groups of threads, whereas Jacquard control can select individual threads.
Warp and weft: Warp threads run lengthwise on a loom, while weft threads pass across them. The loom raises selected warp threads so the weft can form the programmed pattern.
Basile Bouchon: A French inventor who used a perforated paper roll to control a loom in 1725. His early pattern-control system preceded the punched-card mechanism later used by Jacquard.
Damask: A reversible figured fabric whose pattern contrasts satin and matte weave structures. Card-controlled weaving allowed damask patterns to be produced with less manual pattern selection.
Luddite movement: A movement of English textile workers who destroyed machinery in protest against economic and workplace changes. Jacquard technology became a symbol of mechanization's threat to skilled textile labor.
Power loom: A loom driven by an external power source rather than solely by human effort. Power looms automate the weaving motion; Jacquard control specifically automates pattern selection.

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