Jacquards' Web Read Online Free PDF Page B

as art, the statue does at least furnish a lasting memorial to a man whose inventive labours led not only to a revolution in weaving, but also in how mankind handles information.
    Joseph-Marie Jacquard was born on 7 July 1752 , in the Lyons parish of St Nizier. This parish is in La Presqu’île, a few hundred yards south of Croix Rousse. Jacquard was the fifth of nine children of Jean-Charles Jacquard and his wife Antoinette. Jean-Charles was a master-weaver of brocaded fabrics. He was initially fairly prosperous.
    The family lived in La Presqu’île, in a succession of apartments that had workshops attached where Jean-Charles supervised several silk-weavers. Like the sons of many Lyons weavers, young Joseph-Marie (known familiarly as Joseph) did not go to school; his father needed him to perform odd jobs in the workshop. Joseph and his sister Clémence, who was five years older than him, were the only Jacquard children to survive into adult-hood. Their mother Antoinette died on 15 July 1762 , when Joseph was ten years old. After her death, the family gradually slid into poverty.
    Joseph worked most days in his father’s workshop, growing up in an atmosphere saturated with the craft of silk-weaving. He lived surrounded by the tools of the trade: the big bobbins of dyed silk fabric, the smaller, precious bobbins of gold and silver thread and the great heavy wooden drawlooms. These, with their hundreds of warp threads and their jungle of elaborately contrived 22
    The son of a master-weaver
    vertical cords, pulleys, and control rods, were worked from dawn to dusk to produce a few centimetres of precious, beautiful decorated fabric.
    On 20 January 1765 , Clémence married a family friend, Jean-Marie Barret, in the church of Saint-Nizier. Barret, a cultured man who adored books, took an interest in Joseph’s education. He taught the twelve-year-old to read and told him of the greater world beyond the silk-weaving workshop. Joseph knew little of that world, but the great ships he saw on Lyons’s rivers, taking the city’s silk fabrics and other merchandize to customers around the world, whetted his curiosity for other places and other lives.
    Barret, who became Jacquard’s teacher and mentor, helped to fill in some of the gaps in Joseph’s imagination. Most likely Barret spoke to the boy about politics, too. It was an age when few people outside the privileged nobility or the clergy could see much good in the French political system. Educated but landless people were particularly alive to the outrageous inequalities between those with money and those without. The rich lived lives of preposterous luxury, idleness, and gastronomic and erotic excess. The poor, for their part, dressed like scarecrows. Their diets were so desperately dependent on bread that when its price increased by a few sous they faced starvation.
    In 1772 , at the age of forty-eight, Jean-Charles Jacquard died. It was by no means a premature death by the standards of the day. His will revealed more assets than anyone expected: there was possibly something of the miser in his makeup. As well as the workshop and apartment in Lyons, there was a productive vineyard and even some quarries at the nearby village of Couzon-au-Mont-d’Or. In keeping with the tradition of the times, his only surviving son Joseph, now twenty years old, inherited everything.
    After Jean-Charles’s death, Jacquard worked half-heartedly at his father’s trade, but without much success. He kept himself largely by living off his dwindling capital, never a good idea. On 23
    Jacquard’s Web
    26 July 1778 he married a young woman named Claudine Boichon. Their only son, Jean-Marie, was born in April 1779 .
    The birth of Jean-Marie evidently did not encourage Jacquard to settle down to making a success of his career. What happened to him over the next four years is not clear, but he certainly went through most of his capital with alarming rapidity. In May 1783 , when he was approaching his