Power loom

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Some of the 1200 power looms at the Plevna factory building, completed in 1877 , at the Finlayson & Co cotton mills in Tampere, Finland

The first power loom, a mechanized loom powered by a drive shaft, was designed in 1784 by Edmund Cartwright and first built in 1785, later to be perfected by William Horrocks. It allowed textile making to be done far faster than if a human had done the same work. By 1850, Cartwright's designs were used in over 250,000 machines in England. In 1894 James Henry Northrop emigrated to the USA from Keighley, Yorkshire, England he worked for the Draper Corporation of Hopedale, Massachusetts. His invention of the automatic "weft replenishment" loom revolutionized the weaving industry. Some 700,000 "Northrop" automatic looms were sold worldwide.

Though it eventually became one of the most important inventions in the industrial revolution, it was initially limited by its reliance on water power, which required workshops equipped with power looms to be located near a source of running water. By the start of the 19th century, however, steam power had advanced enough to allow the use of this technology anywhere. Cartwright profited greatly from this, selling hundreds of his looms to Manchester firms.

Francis Cabot Lowell travelled to Great Britain in 1810 to study the textile industry there. He paid particular attention to the workings of the power loom, a device for which there was still no equal in North America. On his return trip, he had to memorize the plans for the machine, as the British had banned the export of the new technology. On his return trip to Boston, he put together a group of investors, and sought the assistance of a brilliant master mechanic named Paul Moody. By 1815, Moody had built and perfected the first power loom in the Western Hemisphere at Waltham, Massachusetts. ^[1]

Originally, power looms used a shuttle to throw the weft across, but in the early part of the 20th century the faster and more efficient shuttleless loom came into use. Today, advances in technology have produced a variety of looms designed to maximize production for specific types of material. The most common of these are air-jet looms and water-jet looms.