"The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through automation..."
U.S. Privacy Protection Study Commission, 1977
Building on a concept proposed by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1745, Joseph-Mane Jacquard (1752- 1834), namesake of the famous loom, perfected a more practicable interpretation of his fellow Frenchman's idea—automation using punched cards.
Jacquard knew from experience that silk weaving, although a skillful art, was extremely repetitive. It was this aspect of the process he attacked and so he set out to control the weaving process by linking the actions of the loom to the pattern of holes on the cards. Each card had the same number of rows and columns, the presence or absence of a hole being detected mechanically and thereby determining the loom's movements. Ultimately, many such cards would be connected in sequence, enabling the loom to weave complex designs time and time again.
In 1803 Jacquard was summoned to Paris to demonstrate his invention and to work for the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. Improvements to his loom mechanism followed, and by 1806 the loom was declared "public property." The invention was violently opposed by weavers who felt it would cost them their jobs, and riots ensued.
From the late nineteenth century onward, the potential to store data on such cards led to their widespread use in the fields of data collection and processing. They were adopted by Charles Babbage for his analytical engine and by Herman Hollerith for tabulating the U.S. census in 1890. The computer age saw the development of cards in formats suited to the needs of programmers and for use with computer languages such as COBOL or FORTRAN.
