Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/646

 490 General History of Europe 869. The Power Loom and Cotton Gin. The enormous output of thread and yarn on these new machines made the weavers dissatisfied with the clumsy old hand loom, which could not now take care of the thread as fast as it was produced. At length, in 1784, Dr. Cartwright, a clergyman of Kent, patented a new loom, run by water power, which threw the shuttle and shifted the weft for itself. This machine was steadily improved SPINNING MULE The spinning mule required only one person to operate a long row of spindles and did the work of many hand-spinners during the nineteenth century until today a single machine operated by one workman can do as much weaving in a day as two hundred weavers could do with old-fashioned hand looms. The accompanying cut gives some idea of a modern spinning machine. Other inventions followed. The time required for bleaching was reduced from several months to a few days by the use of acids, instead of relying principally upon the sunlight. In 1792 Eli Whitney, in the United States, invented a power "gin," which enabled one man to take the seeds out of over a thousand pounds of cotton a day instead of five or six pounds, which had been the limit for the hand worker.