Now look at the balcony on the first floor. You’ll see a man standing beside a large sheet of patterned fabric. Next to it is a long strip of white paper with holes punched into it. The man you’re looking at is Joseph Marie Jacquard. Jacquard was born into a silk-weaving family in Lyon in the eighteenth century. Like many silk workers, he grew up around looms, watching complex patterns being created by hand. The process was slow, exhausting, and required highly skilled workers to lift threads row by row. Jacquard’s idea was simple but radical: what if the pattern could be controlled automatically? After years of experiments—and many failures—he created what we now call the Jacquard loom. He used a sequence of punched cards, each representing one row of a design. These are the cards you see in the mural to Jacquard’s right. The holes told the loom which threads to lift and which to leave down. Change the cards, and you could instantly change the pattern. For the first time, complex designs could be repeated perfectly, again and again, without manual work. Not everyone welcomed this invention. Lyon’s silk workers, known as the canuts, saw the machine as a threat. They feared job losses, lower wages, and the disappearance of hard-earned skills. Some looms were destroyed during protests, and Jacquard himself faced strong hostility. Then something remarkable happened. Napoleon Bonaparte visited Lyon and understood what many factory owners did not—that a nation’s strength lay in technological innovation. He recognized the value of Jacquard’s invention, and the French government made an unusual decision. Instead of granting Jacquard a patent, they declared the loom public property. Jacquard received a lifetime pension of three thousand francs a year, a significant sum at the time, making the loom affordable and encouraging widespread adoption. The impact was rapid. Just six years after Napoleon’s intervention, around eleven thousand Jacquard looms were operating across France. Automation increased production, lowered prices, and boosted demand. The silk industry flourished, and at its peak, silk accounted for nearly one-third of France’s economy. This is one reason Jacquard appears on this mural. The other lies in those punched cards. The idea that instructions could be encoded, stored, and read mechanically inspired early computing pioneers. Charles Babbage used the same principle for his Analytical Engine, and punch cards later became essential to early computers. In many ways, Jacquard’s loom is an ancestor of modern software and automation. Let us now move to the next stop.