Punched-card apparatus of a Jacquard loom at a lace factory in Nottingham in 1843. Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752-1834), French silk weaver, had by 1808 invented an automatic, programmable loom based on the punched card system.It could weave complex patterns 24 times more quickly than the drawloom. The cards were coded by the arrangement of punched holes in successive cards to determine the pattern produced by the loom. In 1834, the English mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage (1792-1871), who was developing the Differential Engine calculating machine, saw how to adapt Jacquard's punched-card programming to a completely new purpose: mathematical calculation. He conceived a more ambitious and complex device than his Difference Engine ??the programmable Analytical Engine. Though never built, in less than two years he had sketched out many of the salient features of the modern computer