The most famous image in early computing is not a vacuum tube or a line of code. It is an 1839 portrait of an elderly man, woven entirely from silk using 24,000 punch cards, so impressive that Charles Babbage acquired one while designing his Analytical Engine. The man in the portrait, Joseph Marie Jacquard, was an illiterate French weaver who bounced through failed careers as a straw hat maker, soldier, lime burner, and cutler before laying the mechanical groundwork for the information age.

This episode follows a life of brutal setbacks: the childhood torture of the draw boy's job that planted the seed of automation, the lost inheritance and squandered dowry, the son killed in the Revolution's wars, and the obsessive synthesis of older failed machines into the programmable loom. The punch card's hole-or-no-hole logic, zero or one, proved instructions could be stored on a physical medium and executed by a machine, a straight line from Lyon's silk workshops to IBM and the device you're holding.

• Why "Jacquard" was a neighborhood nickname, and how an illiterate boy absorbed engineering by observation
• The draw boy's misery: the child-labor job so painful it inspired its own elimination
• A gig-economy life in the 1780s: straw hats, lime kilns, cutlery, and a courtroom liquidation
• Standing on failed shoulders: how Jacquard fused earlier loom designs and Breton debugged the result
• From silk to software: punch cards, binary logic, Babbage, and IBM's direct inheritance