weaving

A hand loom as used in Britain from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The simple loom was probably invented in Egypt in 4400 BC, with the more complicated multishaft loom being used in China for silk weaving by AD 1090.

English inventor James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in about 1764. It proved to be one of the key inventions in the textile industry at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

The ‘water frame’ for spinning cotton, designed by British inventor Richard Arkwright in 1768. Although so-called because it was water-powered, it was originally driven by mule. From 1790 onwards it was powered by steam engine. Its increased efficiency allowed Arkwright's factories to successfully compete with Indian calico manufacturers.

Mapuche woman weaving, Chile. The South American Mapuche Indians once lived in small farming villages throughout the Central Valley of Chile. Having struggled to maintain their lifestyle for nearly 400 years, most now live on reservations in the area.

Woman weaving, Turkey. Since Marco Polo reported on the beautiful high-quality carpets produced in the town of Konya in the 13th century, Turkey has been well known for its hand-woven wool and silk carpets. Carpet-weaving originated with nomadic tribes, but carpets are now produced in many towns including Kula, Usak, and Konya.

The production of textile fabric by means of a loom. The basic process involves the interlacing at right angles of vertical threads (the warp) and horizontal threads (the weft). The weft is traditionally carried across from one side of the loom to the other by a type of bobbin called a shuttle, and weaves in and out of the warp, creating the fabric.

The technique of weaving has been used all over the world since ancient times. It has only fairly recently been mechanized and handlooms are still used in many societies, for example, in the manufacture of tweeds in the UK. Handlooms may be horizontal or vertical; industrial looms are generally vertical. In the handloom era the Jacquard machine, the last in a series of inventions for producing complicated designs, was perfected by French inventor Joseph Jacquard in the early 19th century. This used a series of punched cards to control the lifting of the warp threads.

The power loom, first patented in the 1780s, was the invention of English cleric Edmund Cartwright. The speed limitations caused by the slow passage of the shuttle have been partly overcome by the use of water- and air-jet insertion methods, and by the development in the 1970s of ‘multiphase’ looms in which the weft is inserted in continuous waves across the machine, rather than one weft at a time.