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306 cloth, but they permitted one hand to be used exclusively in throwing the shuttle, while the other was solely occupied in driving home the weft. The comparative speed of fabrication, by reason of this invention, won for it the name of "fly-shuttle"; and in truth it is likely that no division of labor between the two hands of one operative ever produced results equal to those which this invention secured.

At once, upon its general adoption, the average production of a loom was more than doubled, and the cloth was of a better quality than formerly. The same shuttle arrangement, with hardly any change, appears in the looms upon which our grandmothers wove their homespun, and they may still occasionally be seen in the old farm-houses of the United States.



As early as 1078 a French naval officer, M. de Gennes, conceived the idea of a power-loom, and communicated his plan to the French Academy. He described, prophetically, the advantages its utilization would effect in economy, in uniformity of product, and in increase of production—precisely as we have since realized them. More than a century elapsed before his ideas were successfully utilized. Numerous attempts were made, but through one defect or another they failed of adoption.

A studious clergyman, addicted more to poetry than to trade, led the way in the solution of this problem. His name was Edmund Cartwright, already alluded to in connection with the