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2 A Jacquard silk-weaving
hand-loom, the first
machine to use punched-
card programming, 1810.
help reduce reliance on expensive skilled labour, and living labour
altogether.
This can be seen in one of the first (and most celebrated) exam-
ples of automation, in which the division of labour was embodied
in a machine (illus.
2
). Joseph-Marie Jacquard's pattern-weaving
loom of
controlled the lifting of each of the warp threads for
each pass of the shuttle through a system of wooden cards punched
with holes. The actions of the human weaver were codified and
converted into marks on the wooden card, which were then 'read'
by the machine in order to repeat them. The Jacquard Loom can be
understood as an early attempt to reduce the costs and difficulties of
employing living labour, by embodying the labour process in fixed
capital. Though embedded in an artisanal paradigm, it anticipates
not only automation but the whole development of labour manage-
ment in which workers' actions become discrete and interchange-
able, and in which individual skill ceases to be of account.
One of the first theoreticians of labour management was the
mathematician Charles Babbage (illus.
1804
3
). In a number of works,
