Cartwright patents the power loom
The patent came forty years before the machine was reliable. Warp had to be dressed to survive mechanical beating, and stop-motions had to be developed before a shed could be run at a profit, so the interval between the patent and general adoption was filled by an expansion of hand weaving rather than its replacement.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- The power loom · technology · United Kingdom · not located
- The British textile industry · industry sector · United Kingdom · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective
Supports the high-wage-economy explanation of why mechanisation was profitable in Britain first, the sequence of textile bottlenecks, and the dating and interpretation of the Engels pause. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session — outbound HTTP to research domains is blocked by the environment's egress proxy and the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted before this pack began. The book is a real and widely held title, but nothing attributed to it here was read from it.
Cambridge University Press · 2009 · Partly verified
Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 2009 (New Approaches to Economic and Social History)
Recorded on The power loom
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- The Great Exhibition · 1 May – October 1851
- Arkwright's patents are overturned · 1785
- The rotative engine turns a shaft · 1781–1782
- Crompton completes the spinning mule · 1779
- Hargreaves devises the spinning jenny · c. 1764
- Parliament bans the use of printed calicoes · 1721