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The Lady, the Loom, and the World’s First Computer

What does fancy fabric have in common with computer programming?

Oct / Nov 2025
Written by Jess Romeo

Science Museum/SSPL/Getty Images.

An 1867 model of a Jacquard loom

Hundreds of years ago, weaving was done by hand on a device called a loom. This was painstaking, tedious work—especially if the fabric had an intricate design. In the early 1800s, a French weaver named Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented a new loom that could weave patterns into fabric automatically.

A series of cards with holes punched in them gave instructions for making the pattern. As each card is added to the machine, the Jacquard loom lifts up certain threads and lowers others. A hole in the card tells the loom to “lift up” the thread. No hole means “leave down.” This became the foundation for modern computer programming. A computer program is a set of coded instructions that a computer uses to complete a specific task.

Antoine Claudet/Wikipedia Commons

An early photograph of Ada Lovelace taken in 1843

In the 1830s, British inventor Charles Babbage was making plans for a machine that could do math calculations. Inspired by the Jacquard loom, Babbage thought punched cards could be used to feed instructions into his machine.

Mathematician Ada Lovelace was one of Babbage’s closest collaborators. In her notes, Lovelace wrote a set of instructions for how Babbage’s machine might calculate a specific series of numbers. This is often considered the first computer program. In 1843, Lovelace wrote that the machine “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”


Science Museum/SSPL/Getty Images.

Cards like these control the Jacquard loom. A hole in the card tells the loom to “lift up” the thread. No hole means “leave down.”

Although the machine was never built, Babbage and Lovelace’s ideas laid the groundwork for modern computer programming. The first electronic computers—which didn’t appear until the 1940s—were programmed with punched cards and paper tape. Today’s computers are just like electronic looms, weaving together bits of information to create everything from Minecraft to TikTok!


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