Minding a running loom

By the 1920s the power loom had long since taken the weaver's arm, but the eye remained, because a loom that breaks a warp end or runs out of weft will keep weaving the fault into the cloth until a person notices. The Type G stopped itself, so one worker could mind thirty to fifty looms rather than one, which makes this the point at which attention was ceded and not merely effort. What the hands had already lost, to Cartwright's power loom and to Jacquard's cards, this ledger records separately under the handloom. What is left to people is drawing the warp into the heddles, mending broken ends, judging the hand and drape of a finished cloth, and setting a machine up for a new fabric.