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Jacquard loom: Difference between revisions
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Did it permanently put a sector of society out of work? It did not do that either. To be sure; there was far less call for hand-weaving, but artisan hand-weavers figured it out. | Did it permanently put a sector of society out of work? It did not do that either. To be sure; there was far less call for hand-weaving, but artisan hand-weavers figured it out. | ||
Who could have predicted ''that''?<ref>Well; Adam Smith, for one.</ref> Loom owners no longer needed hand-weavers | Who could have predicted ''that''?<ref>Well; Adam Smith, for one.</ref> Loom owners no longer needed hand-weavers. | ||
They re-specialised. Now their skill was ''programming the Jacquard loom'' and ''designing faster, fancier, more flexible Jacquard looms''.<ref>Now, no doubt, some of them couldn’t figure out how to switch it on, failed to become programmers, and had a lousy time. This happens.</ref> | ===Sabotage!=== | ||
The Jacquard loom, put many textile workers out of a job. It is said that these weavers who, with the fashion at the time, wore wooden French [[clogs]] called “''sabots''”, not best pleased with being pitched into [[redundancy]] — threw their clogs into the delicate machinery, wreaking havoc. This practice became so popular they gave it a name: “sabotage”.<ref>I am grateful to my correspondent R. Buxton, of Ealing, for this snippet.</ref> | |||
But the poor, truculent, now bare-footed hand-weavers found there was no time to enjoy their new-found “leisure”, much less to pen think-pieces about [[technological unemployment]] or [[universal basic income]], for they were urgently needed to programme, maintain and enhance these fancy new automatic looms. They re-specialised. Now their skill was ''programming the Jacquard loom'' and ''designing faster, fancier, more flexible Jacquard looms''.<ref>Now, no doubt, some of them couldn’t figure out how to switch it on, failed to become programmers, and had a lousy time. This happens.</ref> | |||
===The new 2020 model Jacquard=== | ===The new 2020 model Jacquard=== | ||