Sabotage

Here’s the long version of how we got the words sabotage and saboteur:

The son of a French silk weaver, Joseph-Marie Jacquard had a thriving business operating looms. But to meet the demands of discerning customers for interesting patterns, he needed weavers to lift or depress warp threads before each pass of the shuttle of the loom. This was painstaking work so output was slow and expensive. In 1801, Jacquard came up with an automated loom that operated with a set of punched cards. If there was a hole in the punch card, a spring-loaded pin and corresponding warp thread would be depressed. On the other hand, if there were no hole in the punch card, the pin would lift the warp thread. Jacquard even figured out how to create a loop of punched cards so patterns could repeat. A Jacquard loom was destroyed in the public square in Lyon in 1806. It didn’t stop progress – by 1812, there were an amazing 18,000 Jacquard looms in France. Fashion anyone? Jacquard was awarded a lifetime pension by Napoleon and unlike anyone else in this story, Jacquard has a pattern named after him. Jacquard looms made their way to England in the 1820’s and by 1833, there were more than 100,000 working Power Looms. Surprise, surprise, not everyone was excited about this development. Disgruntled weavers in England burnt many a Jacquard loom. Others learned to shut them down by throwing a wooden shoe, known as a sabot in French, into the loom, and so became known as saboteurs.

From Andy Kessler’s How We Got Here.