Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/321

Rh machine. He had never set foot inside a cotton or woolen mill at the time when he undertook to revolutionize their entire methods. A strange-looking and clumsy machine Cartwright's first power-loom was, according to his own description. "The warp," he wrote to a friend, "was placed perpendicularly, the reed fell with a force of at least half a hundred-weight, and the springs which threw the shuttle were strong enough to have thrown a Congreve rocket. It required the strength of two powerful men to work the machine at a slow rate, and only for a short time'; but I succeeded in weaving by its aid a piece of coarse cloth like sail cloth. Conceiving, in my great simplicity, that I had accomplished all that was required, I then secured what I thought was a most valuable property, by a patent, on April 4, 1785. This being done, I then condescended to see how other people wove; and you will guess my astonishment when I compared their easy mode of operation with mine. Availing myself, however, of what I then saw, I made a loom in its general principles nearly as they are now made." The theologian, having learned what the weavers could tell him, taught them more than they had been able to teach themselves in a thousand years.

The principle and the working of the hand-loom and the power-loom of Dr. Cartwright were the same, and they continue to be the same throughout all the modifications of the perfected loom. Their three fundamental motions are, first, the "shedding," or dividing of the warp threads by means of harnesses, to permit the passage of the weft threads between them; second, the "picking" or shooting of the weft; and, third, the "battening" or beating home of the weft. In the first power-loom, Dr. Cartwright combined, with the frame, the beam, the heddles, and the harnesses of the hand-loom, mechanical substitutes for the weavers' hands and feet. They were tappets and treadles, for operating on the warp; apparatus for throwing the shuttle, driving home the weft, letting off the warp, taking up the cloth, stopping the loom on the breaking of a thread, and self-acting temples. The problem of weaving once solved, however crudely, improvements upon Dr. Cartwright's loom followed naturally. Dr. Jeffray, a Paisley physician, soon improved the Cartwright loom by introducing a device to prevent the breaking of the weft; and it was again improved by one Miller, of Dumbartonshire, who substituted for the spring, in throwing the shuttle, the direct action of the motive power. The splendid machines of to-day, doing their beautiful work so smoothly, so perfectly, so rapidly, have grown gradually, one improvement following another, out of the clumsy Cartwright machine so quaintly described above. It is a source of pride to American manufacturers that in this department also the contributions of American inventors have vastly advanced