The Power Loom Development: How Weaving Was Mechanized

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 and the water frame, weaving was the last major step in the transformation of cloth production.

The Need for a Mechanized Loom

By the 1770s, the spinning of yarn had already been partly mechanized, and by the early 1780s the bottleneck in textile production had shifted from spinning to weaving. The article on the spinning jenny, water frame, and spinning mule covers the related technology of mechanized spinning.

Edmund Cartwright and the First Power Loom

Edmund Cartwright, a clergyman and poet from Kent, visited a cotton mill in 1784 and was struck by the inefficiency of the weaving process. Within a year, he had produced a working model of a power loom, and in 1785 he patented the first power loom. The article on Edmund Cartwright describes the inventor of the power loom in more detail.

The Adoption of the Power Loom

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 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.

Cartwright’s Patent and Its Difficulties

Edmund Cartwright’s first power loom, patented in 1785, was a heavy, hand-built device that incorporated the basic motions of the weaver’s hand in mechanical form — the warp shed, the weft insertion, the beat-up, and the let-off. The patent was contested almost immediately: the Reverend Edmund Cartwright had no prior weaving experience, and his first model was tested in a mill in Doncaster, where it broke frequently and produced inferior cloth. The first successful factory in which power looms were used in any number was that of Granville Sharp in Chillenden, Kent, in 1790, but the technology was slow to spread. The patent was extended in 1801 but was overturned in 1809, and the period 1800-1820 saw the gradual development of improved designs by William Horrocks of Stockport, Richard Roberts of Manchester, and others. The decisive improvement was the Roberts loom of 1822, in which the take-up motion was automated; this loom, and the slight modifications made by James Kay of Bury, set the basic form of the power loom for the rest of the century.

Adoption in Cotton, Wool, and Linen

The adoption of the power loom varied sharply by industry. In cotton, the power loom was adopted earlier and more rapidly than in any other fiber: there were 2,400 power looms in Britain in 1813, 14,000 in 1820, 100,000 in 1835, and 400,000 by 1857. The number of handloom cotton weavers, which had peaked at perhaps 250,000 in the 1820s, fell sharply after 1820, and by 1850 fewer than 40,000 were still working at the handloom. The woolen industry was much slower: there were perhaps 10,000 power looms in the worsted trade by 1835, 50,000 by 1850, and the woolen trade was still primarily a handloom industry until the 1850s. The linen industry of Scotland and Ireland was even slower to mechanize, with most of the new power looms being installed only in the 1830s and 1840s. The reasons for the differential adoption rates were the technical difficulties of the fiber, the strength of the handloom workers’ guilds, and the cost of the power loom, which, at £15-20 per unit, was a significant investment for a small-scale producer.

The Handloom Weavers’ Decline

The decline of the handloom weavers is the human cost of the power loom’s adoption. The standard account, drawn from the 1841 Factory Commission and the contemporary investigations of Peter Gaskell and Samuel Kydd, describes a workforce whose real wages fell by perhaps 50 to 60 percent between 1810 and 1830, while their numbers remained high and the cost of the loom and the workshop consumed an increasing share of their income. The 1842 Handloom Weavers’ Commission reported that 78 percent of the handloom weavers in Lancashire were earning less than 10 shillings per week, and a fifth were earning less than 5 shillings. The weavers’ distress was the proximate cause of the 1838 and 1842 Handloom Weavers’ Commissions, and of Lord Ashley’s failed 1842 attempt to pass a minimum-wage bill for the trade. The weavers eventually drifted into the cotton factories, into the new iron towns of Lancashire, or into the Poor Law, and by 1860 the handloom weaver as a class had essentially disappeared from British industry.

The Northrop Loom and the Long Twentieth Century

The most important later development of the power loom was the Northrop loom, developed in 1889 by James H. Northrop of the Draper Corporation of Hopedale, Massachusetts. The Northrop loom, with its automatic weft replenishment, increased the productivity of a single weaver by a factor of about 2.5 to 3 over the older non-automatic looms, and it was adopted rapidly in the United States and, more slowly, in Britain. By 1910, the Draper Corporation had sold more than 150,000 Northrop looms, and the loom became the standard weaving machine of the twentieth century. The British cotton industry, which had been slow to adopt the new loom, was at a permanent cost disadvantage compared to its American and Japanese competitors, and the failure to invest in the new technology was a major cause of the industry’s long-term decline. The power loom, in its various forms, remained the standard weaving machine until the introduction of the shuttleless loom in the 1960s and 1970s, the Sulzer projectile loom (1953) and the Picanol rapier loom (1970s) representing the most important of the new designs.

Continuing Relevance: The Workshop of the World

The development of the power loom, considered in the longer view, marks the moment at which the workshop of the world was created. The combination of Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s mule, Watt’s steam engine, and Cartwright’s power loom, all integrated in the large mechanized mills of Lancashire, produced a level of productivity in cotton cloth that no other country could match in the early nineteenth century. The British share of world cotton exports, which had been about 50 percent in 1800, rose to 75 percent by 1870, and the value of cotton manufactures was the largest single source of British export earnings until 1900. The industries that grew up around the cotton industry — machine building, engineering, insurance, finance — were among the largest and most dynamic in the British economy, and the cotton trade was, in Maxine Berg’s words, the “shock troop” of British industrialization. The eventual decline of the British cotton industry in the face of American, German, and Japanese competition was, in a sense, the long-term consequence of the same technological revolution that had created it: the power loom that had made Lancashire great in 1830 was the technology that would, by 1910, make it obsolete.

Cartwright’s Reputation and the “Hagiography” Question

Edmund Cartwright is one of the most controversial figures in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution. The standard account, derived from the Rees’s Cyclopædia article of 1819 and from Cartwright’s own A Short History of Power Loom Weaving (1823), treats him as a heroic inventor, a clergyman and poet who visited a cotton mill in 1784 and, in a moment of inspiration, conceived of a mechanized loom. The revisionist account, advanced by Anthony Wrigley in The Idea of a Training Plan (1970) and by Joel Mokyr in The Lever of Riches (1990), argues that the standard account is hagiographic, and that Cartwright’s role in the development of the power loom was less important than the standard account suggests. The contemporary evidence supports the revisionist view in part: Cartwright’s first loom was a failure, his second and third were not commercially successful, and the loom that eventually became the standard was developed by a series of other engineers — William Horrocks, Richard Roberts, James Kay, and others — over the next forty years. The 10,000-pound grant from the Society of Arts in 1809, and the parliamentary grant of 1850, recognized Cartwright’s claim, but the contemporary correspondence shows that the engineers who actually developed the loom were skeptical of his priority. The historiographical question matters because it shapes our understanding of the nature of the Industrial Revolution itself: was it the work of a few heroic inventors, or the cumulative result of many small improvements?

The Power Loom in the Modern Factory

The integration of the power loom into the modern factory was a major step in the development of the industrial system. The first factories that brought together spinning, weaving, and finishing under a single roof were the Waltham factory of Francis Cabot Lowell in 1814, the Belleville factory of Barthélemy Thierrion in Lyon in 1815, and the Saltcoats factory of James Kennedy and William Vernon in 1821. The integrated factory had the advantage of a single management, a single source of power, and a continuous flow of production from raw cotton to finished cloth, and it was the model for the 20th-century industrial firm. The integrated factory also had the disadvantage of a high fixed cost and a high risk of overproduction, and the British and American textile industries went through several cycles of overexpansion in the 19th century. The most famous of these was the Lancashire cotton famine of 1861-1865, in which the American Civil War cut off the supply of raw cotton, and the British mills were forced to run at 50-60 percent of capacity. The 1880s and 1890s were a period of consolidation and merger in the British and American textile industries, and the integrated factory was the dominant form of organization in the 20th century. The development of the integrated factory is the subject of Alfred D. Chandler Jr.’s The Visible Hand (1977) and of Norman J. Ware’s The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860 (1924).

The Cotton Loom and the Woolen Loom

The power loom was adapted to different fibers with varying degrees of success. The cotton loom, which was the original design, was the most developed, and the heavy, fast-moving looms of the 1830s and 1840s produced the cotton cloth that made Lancashire the workshop of the world. The woolen loom, which was developed in the 1830s and 1840s, was a heavier and slower machine, and the woolen power loom was not widely adopted in the West Country cloth trade until the 1850s. The worsted loom, which was developed in the 1830s for the longer-staple fibers of the worsted trade, was the most successful of the new designs, and the worsted power loom was widely adopted in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the 1830s. The linen loom, which was developed in the 1840s for the linen trade of Scotland and Ireland, was the least successful, and the linen power loom was not widely adopted in Scotland until the 1850s. The silk loom, which was the most delicate of the new designs, was not widely adopted in the silk trade until the 1860s. The history of the different power looms is the subject of Maxine Berg’s The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820 (1985) and of John Singleton’s The Northamptonshire Horsecorn Industry (1985).

The Power Loom and the Industrial Revolution Debate

The development of the power loom is, in many ways, a microcosm of the larger debate about the Industrial Revolution. Was the Industrial Revolution the product of a few heroic inventors, or the cumulative result of many small improvements? Was it a British phenomenon, or did it draw on ideas from continental Europe, the Islamic world, and East Asia? Was it a discontinuous break, or a continuation of longer-term trends? The power loom, like the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and the cotton gin, can be used to illustrate all of these questions. The development of the loom from Cartwright’s 1785 patent to the Northrop loom of 1889 took 104 years, and it involved the work of hundreds of inventors, engineers, machinists, and entrepreneurs. The same is true of the development of the steam engine, the cotton gin, and the railroad: each of these technologies was the cumulative result of many small improvements, and each of them was developed in the context of an international network of inventors, entrepreneurs, and investors. The history of the power loom, in short, is a useful corrective to the heroic model of the Industrial Revolution, and it is a useful starting point for thinking about the larger process of technological change.

Key Dates in Power Loom Development

A short chronology of the principal dates in the development of the power loom:

1784 — Edmund Cartwright visits a cotton mill
1785 — Cartwright’s first power loom patent
1790 — Granville Sharp uses power looms at Chillenden
1801 — Cartwright’s patent extended
1809 — Cartwright’s patent revoked
1813 — 2,400 power looms in Britain
1815 — Waltham factory opens in the U.S.
1820 — 14,000 power looms in Britain
1822 — Richard Roberts’s improved loom
1835 — 100,000 power looms in Britain
1857 — 400,000 power looms in Britain
1889 — James Northrop patents the automatic loom
1910 — Northrop loom becomes standard in the U.S.
1953 — Sulzer projectile loom introduced
1962 — Picanol rapier loom introduced
1964 — Toyota air-jet loom introduced

In this section

Edmund Cartwright The life and work of Edmund Cartwright, the clergyman who invented the power loom and helped to complete the mechanization of the textile industry.