Talk:Joseph Marie Jacquard

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Textile arts Mid‑importance

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Invention

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This biography of Jacquard is WRONG

Please see: Janet Delve, "Joseph Marie Jacquard: Inventor of the Jacquard loom," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 29, no. 4, pages 98-102 (October-December 2007).

Contrary to the account posted, Jacquard's father was a man of substantial property: he owned a workshop (where he kept his looms), a house, a vineyard, and a quarry. Joseph, the son, inherited all of this when his father died in 1772. Joseph dabbled in real estate. He married a widow of considerable property. He did fall into debt, but he did not become destitute. He did have a son Jean Marie (born 19 April 1799), but there is no evidence to support the claim that Jean Marie died at his father's side during a battle.

Jacquard's loom was NOT an immediate success: the mechanism that drove the belt of cards was faulty. Only after Jean Antoine Breton solved the mechanism's problems did sales of the loom improve.

I suspect that much of the misinformation about Jacquard came from this source, which was used as the basis of most subsequent accounts of Jacquard:

General Jean-Victor Poncelet, Travaux de la Commission Francaise. L’Exposition Universelle de 1851, vol. 3, part 1 (Machines et outils appliqués aux arts textiles), section 2, pages 348-349 (1857).

Cwkmail (talk) 17:11, 1 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I hope that editor Cwkmail, or someone else, can look into the above and change the article accordingly. If I have time then I'll try. - My only experience with Jacquard concerns his connection with the punched cards of computing. Should more on this connection be in the article? - Astrochemist (talk) 11:34, 3 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Tag and material

One or more previous editors have added some good, authoritative sources, and so I removed the leading tag. Had the article completely lacked reputable citations, I would have left the tag there. Almost any Wikipedia article can use more references, so the tag did not deliver much new information for this particular article. - Astrochemist (talk) 11:34, 3 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Contradictory timeline

The timeline presented in the article is self-contradictory, unless Jacquard also invented time travel. If Jacquard started to "dabble" in inventing the Jacquard loom in 1804, he cannot very well have demonstrated it in 1801. --Lambiam 22:30, 17 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Not contradictory at all - it appears he started to dabble in 1800 when he invented the treadle loom, that would be the one he demonstrated in 1801. Worm^TT(talk) 21:09, 28 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The wording is ambiguous. After mentioning three inventions, it then refers to "his invention," and by this time, we can't know what is intended. The "treadle loom" perhaps, but someone should go to the source and clean this up. Thanks for pointing this up, Lambiam (talk · contribs). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sfarney (talk • contribs) 21:38, December 28, 2015 (UTC)

What did Jacquard actually invent?

Vaucanson already constructed a fully automated loom with instructions read from a paper tape some fifty years before Jacquard. What was it about Jacquard's version that gave it a potential that was "immediately recognized" and that its predecessors apparently lacked? --Lambiam 22:40, 17 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Several factors may explain why Vaucanson's machine was not adopted, unlike Jacquard's.

Technically first , Vaucanson abandoned the idea of Falcon's linked punched bound cards for the use of a cylinder, such as the ones he used in his automata. This choice has advantages (Vaucanson had developed a system capable of automatically rotating the cylinder, which made it possible to do without the draw boy), but also several disadvantages: on the one hand, the complexity of the patterns to be woven is much more limited (by the circumference of the cylinder vs. a potentially "infinite" length of cards), and on the other hand, the need to replace the cylinder for each new pattern to be produced. Jacquard's main contribution was to combine both innovations: the use of Falcon's punch cards with an automatically rotating "square cylinder" (more exactly, a parallelepiped) like that of Vaucanson.

Then, Jacquard benefited from a favorable social context: at the end of the 1790s, Lyon had been devastated by revolutionary soldiers, the workforce was lacking, and production had to be restarted, which had been encouraged by decisions of Napoleon (in particular important orders from Lyon industries).

Mastergreg82 (talk) 16:23, 8 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]