The Power Loom: Edmund Cartwright and the Mechanization of Weaving

The power loom, invented by Edmund Cartwright in 1785, completed the mechanization of the British textile industry. After the mechanization of spinning by the spinning jenny, the water frame, and the spinning mule, weaving was the last major step in the transformation of cloth production. The power loom, like the new spinning machines before it, was a complex device that required years of refinement before it became practical, but once it was in operation, it transformed the weaving industry in much the same way that the new spinning machines had transformed the spinning industry.

The Clergyman Inventor

Edmund Cartwright was an unusual figure among the inventors of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, and Samuel Crompton, who were all practical men with experience of the textile industry, Cartwright was a clergyman and poet with no prior experience of weaving or manufacturing. Born in 1743 in Marnham, Nottinghamshire, Cartwright had been educated at Oxford and had taken holy orders in the Church of England. He served as rector of a parish in Kent, but he also had a strong interest in mechanical invention.

The story goes that Cartwright visited a cotton mill in 1784 and was struck by the inefficiency of the weaving process. He became convinced that weaving could be mechanized in the same way that spinning had been, and he set out to design a power-driven loom. Within a year, he had produced a working model, and in 1785 he patented the first power loom.

Cartwright’s first loom was a far cry from the machines that would eventually be used in industry. It was heavy, inefficient, and prone to break threads, and the cloth it produced was of poor quality. Cartwright was a poor mechanic, and he relied on the help of a local blacksmith and other craftsmen to build and refine his designs.

The First Power Loom Mills

In 1787, Cartwright opened a weaving mill in Doncaster equipped with several of his power looms. The mill was destroyed by fire, possibly arson, in the same year, and Cartwright rebuilt. He continued to operate the mill, but it never made a profit, and by 1793 he had been forced to give up the project.

Cartwright’s misfortune did not stop others from trying. Several engineers, including William Radcliffe, Thomas Johnson, and Richard Horrocks, took up the development of the power loom, and by the early 1800s the design had been substantially improved. The most important improvements were the use of a flying shuttle (a descendant of the flying shuttle invented by John Kay in 1733), the use of a more reliable mechanism for lifting the warp threads, and the use of stronger materials for the loom itself.

The improved power loom was adopted gradually by the British cotton industry over the first three decades of the nineteenth century. By 1820, there were about 14,000 power looms in Britain, mostly in cotton mills, and by 1835 there were about 100,000. The adoption of the power loom in the woolen industry was slower, but by the 1840s it was being used in many woolen mills as well.

The Effects of the Power Loom

The power loom had several major effects on the textile industry and on society. It greatly increased the productivity of weaving, and it produced cloth of more consistent quality than was possible by hand. It also completed the transformation of the textile industry, since with both spinning and weaving mechanized, the entire process of cloth production could be concentrated in a single factory.

The power loom had a particularly severe effect on the handloom weavers. Before the power loom, weaving had been a relatively well-paid occupation, and many weavers lived comfortably in their own homes. After the power loom, weaving was mechanized, and the wages of handloom weavers fell sharply. By the 1840s, handloom weaving had become one of the most poorly paid occupations in Britain, and many weavers had been forced into the new factories or into the ranks of the urban poor.

The displacement of the handloom weavers led to widespread social unrest, including the Luddite movement of the 1810s, in which weavers and other textile workers destroyed machines that they blamed for their distress. The story of the Luddites illustrates the social tensions produced by the new industrial technology.

Cartwright and the Parliament

In 1809, Edmund Cartwright petitioned Parliament for a reward in recognition of his contribution to the textile industry. Parliament voted him a grant of £10,000, a substantial sum at the time, in recognition of the value of his invention. The grant did not make Cartwright a rich man, but it did provide some financial recognition for the work he had done.

Cartwright continued to invent and to take an interest in mechanical matters for the rest of his life. He worked on designs for a wool-carding machine and on a fire engine, and he remained active in the scientific and engineering circles of the time. He died in 1823, by which time the power loom had become the standard method of weaving in the British cotton industry.

The Power Loom in the Modern Industry

The power loom, in its various forms, has been the standard weaving machine for nearly two centuries. The Northrop loom, introduced in the 1890s, was one of the most important later developments. The Northrop loom, with its automatic weft replenishment, dramatically reduced the amount of labor required to operate a loom, and it became the standard loom of the twentieth century.

Modern power looms are now highly automated, with computers controlling many of the operations that were once performed by hand. The basic principles, however, are the same as those developed by Cartwright and his successors: a frame on which the warp threads are stretched, a shuttle that carries the weft thread across the loom, and a mechanism that lifts the warp threads in a predetermined pattern to produce the desired weave.

The Power Loom and the Industrial Revolution

The power loom was one of the defining inventions of the Industrial Revolution. By completing the mechanization of the textile industry, it made possible the large-scale production of cheap cloth that would have been unimaginable in the early eighteenth century. The combination of cheap cloth and the steam-powered factory system transformed the way people dressed, the way they worked, and the way they lived, and it created a global market for British cotton goods that was the basis of British industrial dominance in the nineteenth century.

The power loom also illustrates the way in which the new industrial technology was developed and refined over time. Cartwright’s original design was crude and impractical, but it pointed the way to a new kind of weaving machine, and a series of subsequent inventors built on his work to produce the reliable and efficient power loom that became the standard of the industry. Each inventor built on the work of predecessors, and this cumulative refinement is a defining feature of the Industrial Revolution.

What It Teaches Us

The power loom is the cleanest single example in the Industrial Revolution of what David Landes, in The Unbound Prometheus (1969), called “the logic of cumulative technological change.” Cartwright’s 1785 patent was almost certainly a copy of the designs of others — a charge made at the time and accepted by most historians since — but his patent put the device on the public record, and the subsequent thirty-year sequence of patents by William Radcliffe, Richard Roberts, James Kay, and others improved the loom by an order of magnitude in speed, reliability, and yarn-handling. The case shows that the question “who invented the power loom?” has no interesting answer. The interesting answer is the slow, distributed process by which a working machine was made out of a working idea. The same pattern, Joel Mokyr argues in The Lever of Riches (1990), runs through almost every important invention of the period: the patent is the public record, but the working technology is the work of the shop floor. The unresolved question is whether patent law, by making the public record possible, was the cause of the cumulative improvement or merely a reflection of it.

Selected Sources

Mitchell, B. R. British Historical Statistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Allen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Humphries, Jane. Childhood and Child Labour in Industrial England: Diversity and Agency, 1750–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.