Weaving on a handloom · Ceded (since 1785)

Edmund Cartwright patents his first power loom, and the year after a second one, which became the model every later builder worked from.

This entry is about the hands, the weaver treading the sheds and throwing the shuttle, and the draw-boy who pulled bunches of loops in succession so that figured cloth could be woven at all. Cartwright's loom of 1785 was worthless and his second was not, and the draw-boy went separately, when Jacquard fitted a card mechanism to a Lyon loom around 1804. Handloom weavers did not vanish at either date, they were undercut over the following half century, which makes this one of the longest and best recorded displacements there is. The power loom took the arm but not the eye, and a weaver still watched for broken ends and changed the shuttle by hand until the automatic loom of 1924, which this ledger records separately. Handloom weaving continues as a protected trade in India, in Japan and in West Africa, and in every mill the drawing-in of a warp and the judgment of a finished cloth are still done by people.