Computing · 1804

Jacquard punched cards

Chains of punched cards that let a loom weave any pattern automatically.

Joseph Marie Jacquard's loom read a chain of cards to lift individual warp threads, weaving portraits with thousands of cards. By 1812 about 11,000 were in use in France, and the idea of card-stored instructions passed directly to Babbage and Hollerith.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 1

Bouchon's punched paper loom 1725

What it led to 3

Watch

How an 1803 Jacquard Loom Led to Computer TechnologyThe Henry Ford · YouTube A Jacquard loom in actionNationalMuseumsScotland · YouTube

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6

Patents awarded in England, 1700-1851 Latest: 455 patents per year (1851) Source: Our World in Data