The Origins of the Power Loom Revisited

Abstract

In mechanizing spinning, productivity gains arose by enabling multiple threads to be spun at a time. A re-reading of Edmund Cartwright’s original power loom patent of 1785 shows that, contrary to the story he later told, he was seeking to do the same in weaving by weaving multiple webs at one time. This attempt failed and future efforts to mechanize weaving focused on mechanizing the traditional horizontal loom, with productivity increases coming through increasing speeds and enabling one person to manage more than one loom. To achieve this required the solution of a number of non-trivial engineering problems and it was not until around 1860 that the power loom could be used to weave the full range of cloths produced by the Lancashire cotton industry. Key people in this development were William Horrocks of Stockport, Richard Roberts of Manchester and the Blackburn engineers of the 1840s.