Power loom

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A Northrop loom manufactured by Draper Corporation in the textile museum, Lowell, Massachusetts.

A power loom is a mechanized

industrialization of weaving during the early Industrial Revolution. The first power loom was designed and patented in 1785 by Edmund Cartwright.[1]
It was refined over the next 47 years until a design by the Howard and Bullough company made the operation completely automatic. This device was designed in 1834 by James Bullough and William Kenworthy, and was named the Lancashire loom.

By the year 1850, there were a total of around 260,000 power loom operations in England. Two years later came the Northrop loom which replenished the shuttle when it was empty. This replaced the Lancashire loom.

Shuttle looms

Shuttle with pirn
Shuttle loom operations: shedding, picking and battening

The main components of the loom are the warp beam, heddles, harnesses, shuttle, reed, and takeup roll. In the loom, yarn processing includes shedding, picking, battening and taking-up operations.

  • Shedding. Shedding is the raising of the warp yarns to form a loop through which the filling yarn, carried by the shuttle, can be inserted. The shed is the vertical space between the raised and unraised warp yarns. On the modern loom, simple and intricate shedding operations are performed automatically by the heddle or heald frame, also known as a harness. This is a rectangular frame to which a series of wires, called heddles or healds, are attached. The yarns are passed through the eye holes of the heddles, which hang vertically from the harnesses. The weave pattern determines which harness controls which warp yarns, and the number of harnesses used depends on the complexity of the weave. Two common methods of controlling the heddles are dobbies and a Jacquard Head.
  • Picking. As the harnesses raise the heddles or healds, which raise the warp yarns, the shed is created. The filling yarn is inserted through the shed by a small carrier device called a shuttle. The shuttle is normally pointed at each end to allow passage through the shed. In a traditional shuttle loom, the filling yarn is wound onto a quill, which in turn is mounted in the shuttle. The filling yarn emerges through a hole in the shuttle as it moves across the loom. A single crossing of the shuttle from one side of the loom to the other is known as a pick. As the shuttle moves back and forth across the shed, it weaves an edge, or selvage, on each side of the fabric to prevent the fabric from raveling.
  • Battening. As the shuttle moves across the loom laying down the fill yarn, it also passes through openings in another frame called a reed (which resembles a comb). With each picking operation, the reed presses or battens each filling yarn against the portion of the fabric that has already been formed. The point where the fabric is formed is called the fell. Conventional shuttle looms can operate at speeds of about 150 to 200 picks per minute

With each weaving operation, the newly constructed fabric must be wound on a cloth beam. This process is called taking up. At the same time, the warp yarns must be let off or released from the warp beams. To become fully automatic, a loom needs a filling stop motion which will brake the loom, if the weft thread breaks.

Operation

Operation of weaving in a

textile mill
is undertaken by a specially trained operator known as a weaver. Weavers are expected to uphold high industry standards and are tasked with monitoring anywhere from ten to as many as thirty separate looms at any one time. During their operating shift, weavers will first utilize a wax pencil or crayon to sign their initials onto the cloth to mark a shift change, and then walk along the cloth side (front) of the looms they tend, gently touching the fabric as it comes from the reed. This is done to feel for any broken "picks" or filler thread. Should broken picks be detected, the weaver will disable the machine and undertake to correct the error, typically by replacing the bobbin of filler thread in as little time as possible. They are trained that, ideally, no machine should stop working for more than one minute, with faster turn around times being preferred.

Operation of this needs more than 2 people because of the way it works.

History

A loom from the 1890s with a dobby head. Illustration from the Textile Mercury.

The first ideas for an automatic loom were developed in 1784 by M.

Vaucanson in 1745, but these designs were never developed and were forgotten. In 1785 Edmund Cartwright patented a power loom which used water power to speed up the weaving process, the predecessor to the modern power loom. His ideas were licensed first by Grimshaw of Manchester who built a small steam-powered weaving factory in Manchester in 1790, but the factory burnt down. Cartwright's was not a commercially successful machine; his looms had to be stopped to dress the warp. Over the next decades, Cartwright's ideas were modified into a reliable automatic loom. These designs followed John Kay's invention of the flying shuttle, and they passed the shuttle through the shed using levers. With the increased speed of weaving, weavers were able to use more thread than spinners could produce.[2]

Series of initial inventors

A series of inventors incrementally improved all aspects of the three principal processes and the ancillary processes.

Further useful improvements

There now appear a series of useful improvements that are contained in patents for useless devices

  • Horny, Kenworthy and Bullough of Blackburn (1834): the vibrating or fly reed
  • John Ramsbottom and Richard Holt of Todmorden (1834): a new automatic weft stopping motion
  • James Bullough of Blackburn (1835): improved automatic weft stopping motion and taking up and letting off arrangements
  • Andrew Parkinson (1836): improved stretcher (
    temple
    ).
  • William Kenworthy and James Bullough (1841): trough and roller
    temple (became the standard), A simple stop-motion.[4]

At this point the loom has become automatic except for refilling weft pirns. The Cartwight loom weaver could work one loom at 120-130 picks per minute- with a Kenworthy and Bullough's Lancashire Loom, a weaver can run four or more looms working at 220-260 picks per minute- thus giving eight (or more) times more throughput.

  • James Henry Northrop (1894) invented a self-threading shuttle and shuttle spring jaws to hold a bobbin by means of rings on the butt. This paved the way to his automatic filling and changing battery of 1891, the basic feature of the Northrop Loom. The principal advantage of the Northrop loom was that it was fully automatic; when a warp thread broke, the loom stopped until it was fixed. When the shuttle ran out of thread, Northrop's mechanism ejected the depleted pirn and loaded a new full one without stopping. A loom operative could work 16 or more looms whereas previously they could only operate eight. Thus, the labor cost was halved. Mill owners had to decide whether the labor saving was worth the capital investment in a new loom. In all 700,000 looms were sold. By 1914, Northrop looms made up 40% of American looms. Northrop was responsible for several hundred weaving related patents.

Looms and the Manchester context

The development of the power loom in and around

handloom was still more important economically than the power loom when the roles reversed.[5] Because of the economic growth of Manchester, a new industry of precision machine tool
engineering was born and here were the skills needed to build the precision mechanisms of a loom.

Adoption

Number of Looms in UK[6]
Year 1803 1820 1829 1833 1857
Looms 2,400 14,650 55,500 100,000 250,000

Draper' strategy was to standardize on a couple of Northrop Loom models which it mass-produced. The lighter E-model of 1909 was joined in the 1930 by the heavier X-model. Continuous fibre machines, say for rayon, which was more break-prone, needed a specialist loom. This was provided by the purchase of the Stafford Loom Co. in 1932, and using their patents a third loom the XD, was added to the range. Because of their mass production techniques they were reluctant and slow to retool for new technologies such as shuttleless looms.[7]

Decline and reinvention

Originally, power looms used a

rapier looms, air-jet looms and water-jet looms.[8]

Social and economic implications

For broader coverage of this topic, see Industrial Revolution § Social effects.

Power looms reduced demand for skilled handweavers, initially causing reduced wages and unemployment. Protests followed their introduction. For example, in 1816 two thousand rioting Calton weavers tried to destroy power loom mills and stoned the workers.[9] In the longer term, by making cloth more affordable the power loom increased demand and stimulated exports, causing a growth in industrial employment, albeit low-paid.[10] The power loom also opened up opportunities for women mill workers.[11] A darker side of the power loom's impact was the growth of employment of children in power loom mills.[12]

Dangers

There are a number of inherent dangers in the machines, to which inattentive or poorly trained weavers can fall victim. The most obvious is the moving reed, the frames which hold the heddles and the "pinch" or "sand" roll utilized to keep the cloth tight as it passes over the front of the machine and onto the doff roll. The most common injury in weaving is pinched fingers from distracted or bored workers, though this is not the only such injury found. There are numerous accounts of weavers with long hair getting it tangled in the warp itself and having their scalp pulled away from the skull, or large chunks of hair pulled off.[13] As a result of this, it has become industry standard for companies to require weavers to either keep hair up and tied, or to keep their hair short so as not to allow it to become tangled. Also, due to possible pinch points on the front of machines, loose, baggy clothing is prohibited. In addition, there is a risk of the shuttle flying out of the loom at a high-speed (200+ mph/322 kmh) and striking a worker if the moving reed encounters a thread/yarn or other mechanical jam/error. One complication for weavers, in the terms of safety, is the loud nature in which weave mills operate (115dB+). Because of this, it is nearly impossible to hear a person calling for help when entangled. This has led OSHA to outline specific guidelines[14] for companies to mitigate the chances of such accidents occurring. However, even with such guidelines in place, injuries in textile production due to the machines themselves, are still commonplace.

See also

References

Citations

  1. ISBN 978-0-07-668128-0
    .
  2. ^ Marsden 1895, p. 64
  3. ^ Marsden 1895, pp. 70, 71
  4. ^ Marsden 1895, pp. 88–95
  5. ^ Miller & Wild 2007, p. 10
  6. ^ Hills 1993, p. 117
  7. ^ Mass 1990
  8. ^ Collier 1970, p. 111
  9. ISBN 0520208838
  10. ISBN 0719037255
  11. ISBN 0415979021
  12. ISBN 0415381371
  13. ^ "Lucy Larcom (1824-1893)". National Women's History Museum. Archived from the original on 2014-03-25. Retrieved 2014-03-25.
  14. ^ Crocker, Charles (2011). "Weaving and Knitting". ILO Encyclopaedia of Occupational Health and Safety. Archived from the original on 2014-03-24. Retrieved 2014-03-23.

Bibliography

External links

Media related to Power looms at Wikimedia Commons

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