The History of Punched Cards
What if the connection between weaving, music, and computing was a love story?
The history of technology is also a love story.
The same idea surfaces three times: holes punched in a card, read as instruction. Jacquard's loom in 1804, Carpentier's harmonium in 1881, Hollerith's census machine in 1890 — textiles, music, data. Standard histories call this parallel innovation and move on. Carpentier didn't: he described writing music dans le langage de Jacquard, in the language of the loom.
So I wrote it as a romance instead. A musician encodes a song for a woman he cannot have in that same language, leaves the card on a weaving machine and never delivers it. Each inventor finds it afterwards and gives the format a new use without ever knowing what it says. I cut the cards from wood by hand. They read: I just need you and some sunsets.
Tomorrow is his wedding. The bride is not the love of his life. He sneaks out of his house to see the girl for the very last time.
“Do you think you will regret it?” They rush into a store, both breathing heavily. He takes off his wet jacket and pretends not to hear the question. She pats her own shoulder to get rid of the rain on her body and asks again.
“Do you think you will regret it?” This time she stares at him with her light brown eyes, he trembles. “To leave me……” She grabs his arm and moves his body facing hers. He stares into her eyes this time.
After knowing her for 20 years, this is the first time her eyes retained a look of solemnity. He takes a deep breath, suddenly, he understands that he can never give her the answer she wants to hear. He clenches the letter with his right hand and hides his trembling left hand under his wet jacket. With a calm voice and determined look, he said, “No.”
He is a musician, he spent all of his life on music. Until this moment he still thinks that music is his whole world. The wind blows up all the wet leaves on the floor. She looks frightened. All of the sudden, he feels so cold, extremely freezing cold. He feels like the cold sneaking into his bone. Perhaps, it is because wind blows through his wet body. Or maybe it is because his spirits already left his body at the time he answered “no”. He understands it’s hard for her to accept his decision, his answer, or his unexpected action in this short amount of time. Even himself cannot find a reasonable explanation to his answer. As it may be the God wants him to shout out for himself to make the move without hesitating at this moment. However, it is just in time to scare her away.
After a silent moment, they both look out the window without any words until the rain stops. She left. She quickly gone from his sight. Without a wave, without a blessing, and without saying goodbye.
He didn’t give the letter to her. Actually, it wasn’t a letter, it’s his song for her. He knows that she doesn’t know how to read music notes, so he uses ● and O to represent whether a piano key is pressed or not.
He has never seen her again. He is glad that they did not say farewell to each other. In that way, they will always remember this moment and thinking of that this might not be the end.
The store they were in was a weaving machine store. He left his letter on one of the machines. Wishing one day, the girl will see what he tries to deliver.
Joseph Marie Jacquard walked by an old weaving machine store. Once he tried on one of the machines, something stuck inside the weaving yarn.
1804Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated a mechanism to automate loom operation. A number of punched cards were linked into a chain of any length. Each card held the instructions for shedding (raising and lowering the warp) and selecting the shuttle for a single pass. It is considered an important step in the history of computing hardware.
WikipediaJules Carpentier was in one of his friend’s party. While he is drunk, he found an old letter under a weaving machine.
1881Jules Carpentier developed a method of recording and playing back performances on a harmonium using punched cards. The system was called the Mélographe Répétiteur and “writes down ordinary music played on the keyboard dans la langage de Jacquard”, that is as holes punched in a series of cards.
WikipediaAt the age of 10, Herman Hollerith was reading his great-grandmother’s diary. Four pieces of wood sitting silently inside the book but he doesn’t know what the circles and holes were for.
1890Herman Hollerith invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine. After some initial trials with paper tape, he settled on punched cards, developing punched card data processing technology for the 1890 US census.
WikipediaEvery time an idea crosses from one field into another, someone has seen beauty in a foreign form and said — what if this could also be mine?