The spinning wheel was gradually improved with a foot treadle drive (about 1530) and a flyer, that which twisted the yarn before winding it onto the spindle, so the spinner did not have to stop spinning to wind the yarn, but, before the Industrial revolution, in Britain, it took at least five spinners to supply one weaver.
In 1738, Lewis Paul and John Wyatt, improved this ratio with the Roller Spinning Machine and the flyer-and-bobbin system. These used two sets of rollers that rotated at different speeds permitting wool to be spun to a more even thickness.
In 1748, Lewis Paul invented a hand driven carding machine, a drum shaped coat of wire spikes that acted like a rotary comb. This was later improved by Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton.
In 1758, Paul and Wyatt took out a patent for an improved roller spinning machine which was later used as a model for Richard Arkwright's water frame.
James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny about 1764. It was a spinning wheel with eight or more spools that significantly reduced the amount of work needed to produce high quality yarn.
The yarn produced by the jenny was not very strong until Richard Arkwright invented a spinning frame, in 1771, which produced a stronger thread, but the frame was too large to be hand operated and had to be driven by a waterwheel (and later steam engines) so it was commonly known as a water frame.
Carding, the first part of the spinning process, was initially done by hand, but in 1775, Arkwright took out another patent for a water-powered carding machine further increasing productivity.
In 1779, Samuel Crompton combined elements of the spinning jenny and spinning frame and developed the spinning mule. This not only produced a stronger thread but was even faster. A worker spinning 100 lb of cotton at a hand-powered spinning wheel in the 18th century needed to work for more than 50,000 hours but, by the 1790s, this amount could be spun in 300 hours by mule, and with an automatic mule it could be spun by one worker in just 135 hours. This phenomenal increase in productivity made cloth more affordable to working people but at the cost of forcing unemployed hand spinners to find other work. However, many of these found work later in the rapidly expanding textile industry.
In 1789, Samuel Slater, an engineer who had worked for Arkwright's partner Jedediah Strutt, emigrated to the USA where he designed and constructing textile mills in New England, helping to start another industrial revolution. Local inventors expanded the industry and in 1793 Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, greatly speeding the processing of raw cotton.
A loom is used to hold warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads. The weft thread was often carried on a shuttle and un-spooled as the shuttle travelled across the cloth between the warp threads when they were raised and lowered.
The back strap loom is a simple hand loom where the warps threads are stretched between two sticks one of which is attached to a fixed object and the other to the weaver (who tensions the warp threads by leaning back into a back strap.
To make cloth wider than their arm-span, weavers needed an assistant to send the shutter back. In 1733, John Kay's flying shuttle was a device that allowed the weaver to propelled the shuttle rapidly across the cloth with a flick of the wrist.. Wide fabric could be produced at greater speeds than could be achieved with the hand thrown shuttle.
A handloom was a simple machine where alternate warp threads pass through a heddle, a ring attached to a lever so that half of the warp thread could be raised or lowered. This provided the space for the shuttle (carrying the weft thread) to pass between the warp threads.
In a warp-weighted (vertical) loom the warp threads were attached to an over head bar and kept in tension by a second bar near floor level. Warp threads could be unwound from one bar and wound up on the other to make longer pieces. It was probably invented before 6000 BCE and spread throughout Europe from Greece.
The earliest evidence of a horizontal loom was found on an Egyptian pottery dish, dated 4400 BCE. It was a frame loom, equipped with foot pedals to lift the warp threads, leaving the weaver's hands free to pass the weft thread and beat the weft thread tightly into place.
A drawloom is a hand-loom for weaving patterned cloth where a "figure harness" is used to control each warp thread separately. It requires a weaver and an assistant to manage the figure harness. The earliest confirmed draw loom fabrics are from China about 400 BCE but weavers were using foot-powered multi-harness looms and Jacquard looms for silk weaving and embroidery about 300 years later during the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE).
(Brocade is a fabric where the patterns are woven into the cloth usually producing a low relief effect).
Joseph Marie Jacquard reinvented the Chinese draw loom in 1804, making it possible to weave complex patterns in brocade, damask and matelassé cloth. Jacquard used a chain of cards, each punched with rows of holes, that could be added to any loom. The cards were laced together in a continuous sequence providing control of each warp thread and controlling which threads of weft or warp appeared on the cloth. The Jaquard looms were a significant innovation and an important device in the development of modern computers.
Weaving was only slowly mechanized. Despite opposition, Edmund Cartwright built powered driven weaving machines between 1785 and 1792 but the process only became semi-automatic in 1842 with Kenworthy and Bullough's Lancashire Loom.
Early in the 19th century there were 250,000 hand weavers in Britain and many lost work as the automatic looms became common. Some weavers emigrated to the USA and others were involved in the Luddite and Chartists movements violently protesting the loss of work.
In 1823, Richard Guest noted the improved productivity. A very good 'Hand Weaver' could weave two pieces of shirting, twenty-four yards long, per week, while a 'Steam Loom Weaver' could weave seven similar pieces in the same time. This also reduce the price of fabric so that even poor people could afford to buy new cloth.
In 1844 after 50 years of incremental innovations by many inventors, John Fisher developed the modern sewing machine. Isaac Merritt Singer build a similar machine in 1851.
In the 20th century, improved techniques produced yarns at rates exceeding 40 metres per second. Workers found it cheaper to buy cloth than to make their own and as clothing became cheaper many poor people were able to afford new, rather than second hand, clothing for the first time.
On modern power looms the weft is passed through the warp by rapiers, springs, waterjets or airjets permitting up to 1500 passes per minute.
Cotton is the world's most important natural fibre. In the year 2007, the global yield was 25 million tons cultivated in more than 50 countries.
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Middle Era
Non-FictionJesus and Muhammad adopted the Hebrew's belief in one God and Christianity and Islam spread throughout the world. The Chinese were using gunpowder in the 9th century and, by the 13th , cannon dominated the battlefields. Paper money appeared in China...
