The last velvet merchant of Venice | Hacker News Reader

The last velvet merchant of Venice

bbc.com

41 pointsErnstByner2112 comments

Note the specific date is 1499, so only just 1400s!

Nearly as good are Balsons Butchers in Bridport, UK who have been operating since 1515.

http://rjbalson.co.uk/

I'm in Bridport at least twice a year and I still haven't paid a visit yet. Will have to rectify that next time and get myself a string of sausages - and possibly a dog to run off with them down the street.

This is why I love my Country. Italy I love you :-)

I'm Italian, too, and of course I love Italy so much.

It hurts to see how Italy's current decline is ruining so many beautiful things that bright, smart and hard-working people have built over the course of many centuries.

Can you speak of this a little more? I have a number of Italian expat friends, but their complaints about Italy's decline are all over the map.

Weavers begin by hand-drawing the design on a millimetre grid. Every half-millimetre of the grid represents a cardboard Jacquard card that is punched through with a hammer, and every punched hole in the cards corresponds to a thread. If a design has a repeat of 1.5m, it requires 3,000 cards. After weavers tie the cards together one by one and hoist them atop the loom, the real work begins.

Did any other industry use cards in this way prior to the punched card era of computers?

The Jacquard loom is what started [1] the punched card era. Check out this episode [2] of the podcast 99 Percent Invisible for an accessible explanation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom

[2] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/kids-clothes-articles...

Hat's off to the weavers, seems like they have infinitely larger intention-span than me.

The end of the article has me confused, they say modern machines can't match these old ones. But then say most of their ancient designs are now done on the mainland with modern machines.

Which is it?

Argh, such attempt at fancy presentation, but so annoying in practice, why overlay text on top of beautiful pictures and be so slow to nagivate?!

Article seems fascinating. Format seems (is) unbearable.

Textbook example of form over function

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