Jacquard Looms - The First Computational Machines

In The Hesperus Prophecy, Mary Elizabeth and her family run past massive Jacquard Looms while racing through Clypeate Headquarters to escape the Obturavi. The year is 1898, and while French weaver and inventor Joseph Jacquard didn’t patent the Jacquard Loom until 1804, the Clypeate already understood the machine’s great potential and had access to the technology.

Also known as a Jacquard Engine, the machine’s punch cards (see picture) were encoded with complex patterns creating intricate fabric designs. The Jacquard Loom is the original programmable machine, using a binary system to instruct the loom. While the Jacquard Loom’s function was limited to weaving fabric, later Analytical Engines, like the one proposed by Charles Babbage (see Analytical Engines), were designed to perform complex calculations.

The Jacquard Loom’s punch cards represented a revolutionary system of binary data storage (the card is punched or not punched), allowing the cards to store information and be repetitively read by the loom to produce the same complex pattern reliably.

In the 1820s, Charles Babbage expanded upon Jacquard’s use of perforated cards to store information, his Analytical Engine being considered the first general-purpose computational machine.

In the 1880s, Herman Hollerith, one of IBM’s founders, created more advanced machines using punched cards to store and analyze data. For the first time companies could itemize, categorize, and compile statistical and accounting data. Jacquard’s data storage system proved so useful that punch cards were used to input data into digital computers until the mid-20th century.

Later in The Hesperus Prophecy, James and Declan are surprised by the Analytical Engine Room’s diversity of machines. Like layers of a fossil record, the most modern machines sit atop the relics of the past, with Jacquard Looms at the base. Embrie suggests the punched cards running through these looms are still contributing information to ALVA, and while it seems improbable that the bulky looms used to weave patterns into textiles would be relevant, modern computers can trace their roots back to these humble looms. What purpose they serve for ALVA, we don’t know.