According to Father, it took roughly four thousand punched cards to manufacture a single textile; he told us that he had seen a portrait of the gadget’s inventor, a Frenchman by the name of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, which had taken over twenty-four thousand cards to weave. The magic of it all, he said, is that once it had been set up with the proper instructions, a single Jacquard loom could produce unlimited copies of a pattern, without the intervention of human workers, so its impact on the weaving industry had been enormous.
