[1][2] Joseph Marie Charles dit Jacquard was born into a conservative Catholic family in Lyon, France, on 7 July 1752.

He was one of nine children of Jean Charles dit Jacquard, a master weaver of Lyon, and his wife, Antoinette Rive.

[3] Joseph initially helped his father operate his loom, but the work proved too arduous, so Jacquard was placed first with a bookbinder and then with a maker of printers' type.

His wife retained a house in Oullins (on Lyon's south side, along the Rhone River), where the couple resided.

[3] Charles Ballot stated that after the rebellion of Lyon in 1793 was suppressed, Joseph and his son escaped from the city by joining the revolutionary army.

[5] In 1801, Jacquard exhibited his invention at the Exposition des produits de l'industrie française in Paris, where he was awarded a bronze medal.

A loom by Jacques de Vaucanson on display there suggested various improvements in his own, which he gradually perfected to its final state.

Although his invention was fiercely opposed by the silk-weavers, who feared that its introduction, owing to the saving of labour, would deprive them of their livelihood, its advantages secured its general adoption, and by 1812 there were 11,000 Jacquard looms in use in France.

In 1725 Basile Bouchon invented an attachment for draw looms that used a broad strip of punched paper to select the warp threads that would be raised during weaving.

[20][21] By 1737, a master silk weaver of Lyon, Jean Falcon, had increased the number of warp threads that the loom could handle automatically.

He developed an attachment for looms in which Bouchon's paper strip was replaced by a chain of punched cards, which could deflect multiple rows of hooks simultaneously.

Like Bouchon, Falcon used a "cylinder" (actually, a four-sided perforated tube) to hold each card in place while it was pressed against the rows of hooks.

[23] In 1741, Jacques de Vaucanson, a French inventor who designed and built automated mechanical toys, was appointed inspector of silk factories.

In Vaucanson's mechanism, the hooks that were to lift the warp threads were selected by long pins or "needles", which were pressed against a sheet of punched paper that was draped around a perforated cylinder.

Vaucanson also added a ratchet mechanism to advance the punched paper each time that the cylinder was pushed against the row of hooks.

[13] In 1804,[30] at the urging of Lyon fabric maker and inventor Gabriel Dutillieu, Jacquard studied Vaucanson's loom, which was stored at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

[5] By 1805 Jacquard had eliminated the paper strip from Vaucanson's mechanism and returned to using Falcon's chain of punched cards.