This “essential piece of computing history” just sold for $43,750

Charles Babbage is widely recognized as a pioneer of the programable computer due to his ingenious designs for steam-driven calculating machines in the 19th century. But Babbage drew inspiration from a number of earlier inventions, including a device invented in 1804 by French weaver and merchant Joseph Marie Jacquard. The device attached to a weaving loom and used printed punch cards to "program" intricate patterns in the woven fabric. One of these devices, circa 1850, just sold for $43,750 at Sotheby's annual History of Science and Technology auction. "Technically, the term 'Jacquard loom' is a misnomer," said Cassandra Hatton, a senior specialist with Sotheby's. "There's no such thing as a Jacquard loom—there's a Jacquard mechanism that hooks onto a loom." It's sometimes called a Jacquard-driven loom for that reason. There were a handful of earlier attempts to automate the weaving process, most notably Basile Bouchon's 1725 invention of a loom attachment using a broad strip of punched paper and a row of hooks to manipulate the threads. Jacquard brought his own innovations to the concept. Per Sotheby's auction website:

Jacquard... conceived of developing a semi-automatic tone-selection device, which would be integrated onto the loom, resulting in quicker production and more intricate patterns. Jacquard's punch-card system worked much in the same way as a fax machine: each punch in the card directed a black or a white thread into the headstock of the loom, pinpointing the desired thread into place.

The invention was not popular with loom operators, many of whom lost their jobs and took to smashing Jacquard looms in protest. The mechanism just sold at auction belonged to one of Hatton's former clients, now deceased. The collector had been trying to establish a museum on the history of computing, grounding his vision in the early attempts to mechanize computation by Jacquard, Babbage, and others. The loom "was his pride and joy," said Hatton. "He bought the original mechanism and then commissioned somebody to make the loom and a second [mechanism] so he could use it. So the loom is fully operational." The piece comes with a large box of accessories, including the original 19th-century punch cards—everything one would need to operate the machine. Jacquard's machine was capable of programming patterns with such precision, it was even used in 1886 to create a prayer book woven entirely in silk, using black and gray thread. Only around 50 copies were made. The Sotheby's auction didn't offer any rare prayer books this year, but there was a portrait of Jacquard—woven in silk on a Jacquard loom—with a mini-loom and punch card on his desk, as well as another woven silk portrait showing several men in front of a loom holding the aforementioned portrait (so very meta). Those portraits sold for $10,625 and $11,875, respectively. Because the Jacquard machine relied on replaceable punch cards to control a sequence of operations, it's deemed to be a forerunner of computer programming. It certainly influenced Babbage's pioneering design for an Analytical Engine, the successor to his steam-powered Difference Engine—essentially a very large calculator that created tables of values by finding the common difference between terms in a sequence. In a nod to Jacquard, the Analytical Engine was loosely based on the notion of a cotton mill, so there was a memory function called a "store" and a processing function called the "mill." Like the Difference Engine, numbers would be stored in columns of cogs, with each cog representing a single digit. But the Analytical Engine would use punched cards to control the cogs. When strung together, these cards would enable the machine to perform "loops," where a sequence of instructions would be repeated over and over, or "conditional branching," where one series of cards would be skipped and another read if certain conditions were met. Other than a small prototype he kept in his home for demonstrations, Babbage never completed construction of any of his thinking machines. However, in the 1990s, a team of scientists at London's Science Museum built a working model of Babbage's second design for the Difference Engine, using only the materials and tools that would have been available in Babbage's day. And it worked. The machine is now prominently displayed in the museum. For fans of Alan Turing and the World War II era—pivotal to the development of modern digital computing—the auction also included a fully operational Enigma machine, an encryption device frequently used by Nazi Germany in World War II. (Turing was deeply involved in the British efforts to crack the Enigma code.) Even more importantly for the serious collector, "This one has the best provenance I've seen of any machine–a completely unbroken chain of provenance," said Hatton. "We know what bunker it was seized from, we know who seized it, [and] we have the entire paper trail, which is not the case for any other machine that has come to market." It sold for an eye-popping $860,000.