Jacques de Vaucanson - Government Service

Government Service

In 1741 he was appointed by Cardinal Fleury, chief minister of Louis XV, as inspector of the manufacture of silk in France. He was charged with undertaking reforms of the silk manufacturing process. At the time, the French weaving industry had fallen behind that of England and Scotland. Vaucanson promoted wide-ranging changes for automation of the weaving process. In 1745, he created the world's first completely automated loom, drawing on the work of Basile Bouchon and Jean Falcon. Vaucanson was trying to automate the French textile industry with punch cards- a technology that, as refined by Joseph-Marie Jacquard more than a half century later, would revolutionize weaving and, in the twentieth century, would be used to input data into computers and store information in binary form. His proposals were not well received by weavers, however, who pelted him with stones in the street and many of the more revolutionary ones were largely ignored.

He invented several machine tools, such as the first fully documented, all metal slide rest lathe, around 1751 (Though Derry & Williams place this invention around 1768). It was described in the Encyclopédie.

In 1746, he was made a member of the Académie des Sciences.