Also at the Berlin Tech Museum was a punch tape driven embroidery machine. The Tech Museum has a ton of industrial textile equipment as part of their permanent collection. The machines are completely mechincal, as far as I can tell no electricity is required.
Sadly I couln’t read the German placquard explaining more about it, and couldn’t find much info online. I got a snapshot of the name plate so I’d at least know what it was called.
If anyone knows more about these machines I’d love to hear it.
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January 4, 2009 at 3:02 pm
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January 4, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Josef Knecht
The automatic embroidery machine was invented by Franz Josef Gahlert and Max Bretschneider in the 1920s, and was produced by the Company Würker in Dresden.
The Inventors obtained a US-Patent in 1929 (US1707263A) – so if you want to find out how it works or build your own, you can download the fulltext here:
http://v3.espacenet.com/searchResults?locale=en_V3&NUM=US1707263A
Anyway – embroidery machines are pretty awesome. If jacquard-looms were the first raster graphics devices, then this machine is the mother of scalable vector graphics
January 15, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Hugo
This person, Carl H. Würker has got some patents, all related with the same subject, that you can find at Google Patents.
This one is interesting: http://www.google.com/patents?id=3k9GAAAAEBAJ&printsec=description&zoom=4&dq=wurker#PPA3,M1
and related.
Don’t know if it’s the same Würker…