Mechanical Embroidery Machine
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.
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
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…