Joseph Marie Jacquard

Joseph Marie Charles Jacquard (7 July 1752 - 7 August 1834) was a French weaver and merchant who developed the Jacquard loom, an early programmable textile machine that used punched pasteboard cards to automate weaving patterns, eliminating manual selection of which threads to raise. By 1812 roughly 11,000 Jacquard looms were in use in France. A silk portrait of Jacquard woven on his own loom is said to have inspired Charles Babbage to use perforated cards in his Analytical Engine, and the loom's card mechanism is cited as a forerunner of programmable computing machines including early punched card systems later used by IBM.