A reproduction of cards for an early Jacquard loom. These were punched on an original hand-operated Jacquard punching machine. A complex pattern might require as many as 4000 cards. Punching cards by hand could take weeks, but once punched they could be reused to duplicate the pattern (Textile 2021).

Jacquard's invention automated a slow and tedious process: the manual pulling up of different sets of threads in a loom to create variations between rows. A drawloom, as this type of loom was called, could weave about one inch of patterned silk per day. Jacquard's loom increased this to 24 inches per day (Essinger 2004, 11). It transformed the industry and Jacquard, who was poor, was given a large yearly stipend by the government.

Jacquard's loom was not the first attempt to mechanize the weaving of patterns. Earlier French inventors came up with semi-automated solutions, including Bouchon in 1725 with punched rolls of paper and Falcon in 1728 with punch cards. Vaucanson in 1741 invented a fully automated loom using pinned barrels like a music box, but it was limited to shorter repetitive patterns. Jacquard was the first to come up with a practical solution that completely automated the process (Bruderer 2021).