Laura Kenard is something of a surprise. A recent graduate of the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, she has spent a year overseeing quality control at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Woven Carpet Mills, and the yellow-haired woman in her early twenties looks incongruous at the controls of the immemorial elevator that lifts us to the shop floor.

In fact, there’s a pleasant incongruity about the whole factory. The redbrick mill building goes back to the last century, and so does some of the machinery in it. But that machinery isn’t clinging to life simply because tooling costs were amortized during the Harding administration. Rather, it does what it does superbly well, and there’s heavy demand for its services. “We run two 8-hour shifts,” says Kenard. We’re pretty much open around the clock.”

Those two shifts operate Wilton looms—thirty of them—that produce nearly indestructible carpet, bright with complex designs. Little brass plates on the looms attest to their age: 1947, 1928, 1950. The 1950 example doesn’t look much more modern than the 1928 one; indeed, it doesn’t look all that different from the loom that a French silk weaver named Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented in 1801.

A loom works by separating evennumbered warp threads, which run lengthwise, from the odd-numbered warp threads that lie alongside them; each time the two sets of threads diverge, a shuttle carries the weft thread crosswise through the space. The loom shifts; the warp threads close around the weft thread; the twin sets of warp threads separate again, and again the shuttle brings its weft thread through. The result is plain cloth. Jacquard worked out a way to put elaborate patterns in the cloth. He took cards, punched out patterns in them, and ran them over a battery of hooks, each attached to a strand of colored yarn. When a hole appeared over any given hook, the tuft of the yarn it held became incorporated into the pattern.

Jacquard’s process allowed virtually infinite combinations of patterns, and in the Pennsylvania factory, rows of connected cards loop down at the top of the tall looms, looking for all the world like a gigantic cousin to the perforated paper that makes a player piano sing. Kenard points to where bright stripes of primary color are coming off a twelve-foot-wide loom. ‘That’s carpet for Delta,” she says; farther down the line a more subdued blend of hues will go into the Hotel Du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware. Behind each loom, skeins of thread run back to a vast, orderly grid of spools—the creels that feed the loom. I ask Kenard how many there are, and she stops a passing operator. It’s apparently not his first day on the job. “Figure a 216 pitch,” he says quickly. “That’s 8 ends per inch warp—we call each piece of yarn an end—and, let’s see, you’ve got 1,152 per frame.” The looms can handle up to five frames each.

Each time the sets of thread lift apart, the shuttle slams glittering between them, trailing yarn behind it, then is whacked back by a wooden mallet. It’s hard to imagine a piece of machinery taking more of a beating.

“We break a lot of those shuttles,” says Laura Kenard, “and they’re expensive—a hundred dollars a shot or something. And if they ever get loose …” She shakes her head at the thought of one of the steel-tipped cylinders flying murderously across the shop. “Come on, I’ll show you where the cards are made.”

Bill Schol is eating his lunch by the card-cutting machines. He is the mill superintendent and has been with the outfit for twenty years. “Philadelphia used to be famous for its carpet mills,” he says. “Now we’re the only one left in the city, and there are only two other weaving mills like us in the whole country. Most of these carpets are for public places. That’s because woven carpet is the strongest. Almost everything you see now is tufted carpet, and it’s basically made on glorified sewing machines. It doesn’t wear. Even in airports and casinos—that’s where you get the heaviest traffic- our carpets’ll last seven, eight years.”

Schol points to the machines that punch out the cards. “After the design’s worked out, we cut a hole for each thread.” The cards are encoded with the carpet pattern. “This Jacquard loom really was the forerunner of the computer,” Schol says happily.

Once the master set of cards has been punched hole by hole, it can be reproduced automatically on the repeater that stands nearby. This was made in 1898 by Vernon Royle of Paterson, New Jersey. Royle was highly regarded, and the fact that his repealer is still in regular service suggests why. Moreover, like so many machines from its era, it’s a superb artifact: brass and steel and a graceful iron body picked out with red pinstriping.

“People come in and see this,” says Laura Kenard, “and they want to buy it, take it home. But I say, hey, come on, we need this one!”