Between 1802 and 1804, Joseph Jacquard, a French textile manufacturer, perfected a mechanical means of automatically controlling weaving looms to facilitate the production of woven cloth with complex patterns.
An essential feature of the Jacquard's Loom was a series of punched cards strung tightly together side by side in a long continuous strip. These cards were automatically fed through a loom mechanism in a sequence, with the purpose of controlling the loom's weaving action/ The pattern in woven cloth was produced by raising particular sections of warp threads (those fixed to the frame) each time the shuttle was passed across the frame. In the Jacquard's Loom, each warp could be raised by an individual hook unless a sprung pin deflected the hook. If the spring pin aligned with a hole in a punched card, one end of the pin would pass through the hole, so that the other ed of the pin failed to deflect the hook. Before passing of the each shuttle, the next card was moved close to the pins. Thus the operation depended on, whether each warp would be raised or not raised. Thus, the basic rule of
operation is :
Hole in card - warp thread not raised
No hole n card - warp thread raised
Jacquard's Loom was the start of a chain of developments which has reached to the robot operated by factory production line of today.
The above example can be compared with the binary operation or the binary coding which is the basis of operation in modern computers. The first person known to have used binary codes for number representations was Francis Bacon in 1623.
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