You know how the Eiffel Tower won the Grand Prize at the 1889 World Fair? Well, it had to share the glory with a book.
Not any book: A book ENTIRELY WOVEN IN SILK.
You heard right. And nerds, get this: All pages of this book were produced on the Jacquard loom in 1889, using thousands (200k-500k) of punch cards. Only 50-60 copies were made. >
The loom had to make tiny movements on the scale of a TENTH of a millimetre producing tthe 400x400 resolution per inch². The woven sheets were then glued over super thin cardboard to allow the pages to be turned.
It took two years of trial and error to get the first book done.
It might be the first book produced by a program? Depends on what you mean by "program", but there's a good case to be made. (see next toot for sources)
I found out about this from Twitter, via https://twitter.com/PiersatPenn/status/1455347046798565380, and foud the detail picture above from https://twitter.com/DrKarrSchmidt/status/1427616209042870274.
See https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=1549 for more details and sources, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hk5500VK2k to see the punch cards.
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