Clothing is a basic need for anyone and everyone today. It may be surprising to know actually how much of our clothes are woven. The loom is a device used to weave cloth and tapestry. It has become just as important to the industry as the cloth itself. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads. The precise shape of the loom and its mechanics may vary, but the basic function is the same. This machine has been helping artisans for generations and still serves its purpose without fail.
The loom that we know today had a history no less rich than any other object.
The earliest evidence of a horizontal loom is found on a pottery dish in ancient Egypt. It dates back to 4400 BC and was a frame loom, equipped with foot pedals to lift the warp threads, leaving the weaver's hands free to pass and beat the weft thread. Later in 1786, an English inventor Edmund Cartwright patented the first power loom. Cartwright's attempts to improve the power loom were problematic, but the technical obstacles were gradually solved by other inventors and entrepreneurs later in the 1850s. This automated weaving process sped up weaving production significantly and thus, the textile industry benefitted enormously from the invention of the loom.
The most significant loom invention was the ‘Jacquard loom’. It was demonstrated by Joseph Marie Jacquard in Lyon, France. He described a loom that enabled unskilled workers to weave complex patterns in silk. It was the technology that completely changed the weaving industry. Before the 1800s, weaving was a very mechanical and repetitive process requiring a lot of skill and time. It also required an extra person called the ‘drawboy’ who had to sit next to the weaver and change the thread according to the design.
The Jacquard loom, on the other hand, was based on a system of cards, needles, and hooks. The cards were made of cardboard, where holes could be easily punched to create the design; the hooks and needles used followed the holes in the cardboard, passing through these holes and inserting the thread to create the pattern. The more intricate the design was, the more cards were arranged one after the other on the loom. Thanks to the system on which it was based, the loom allowed the creation of highly complex designs and patterns, in which new colours could be used and marvellous patterns developed. This invention awarded him the bronze medal in Paris in 1804.
His invention was fiercely opposed by the silk weavers at the start. They feared that its introduction, owing to the saving of labour, would deprive them of their livelihood. Initially, it didn’t sell much also because of the card-hole mechanism. But later came Jean Antoine Breton who corrected the punched card system and then the sales erupted.
This invention didn’t only contribute to the textile or the cultural importance of society but also to technological development. The Jacquard loom not only cut back on the amount of human labour but also allowed for patterns to now be stored on cards and to be utilized over and over again to achieve the same product. The jacquard loom allowed to ‘save’ patterns on cards that could be archived and re-used, cutting on time, labour and costs. The system followed a mathematical algorithm, and some have argued that the jacquard loom holds many similarities with computers: both of these machines work by storing and organising information. The ability to change the pattern of the loom's weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to the development of computer programming and data entry.
Charles Babbage (English Mathematician, aka ‘Father of the computer’) knew of Jacquard looms and planned to use cards to store programs in his Analytical Engine. In the late 19th century, Herman Hollerith (American Businessman) took the idea of using punched cards to store information a step further when he created a punched card tabulating machine which he used to input data for the 1890 U.S. Census. A large, punched-card-based data processing industry developed in the first half of the twentieth century, dominated by the International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), with its line of unit record equipment.
In conclusion, it can be seen that the loom was not just another object in our history. It played a major role in the industrial revolution, lived through the French Revolution, and contributed its bit to the technological revolution. It still is instrumental in today’s world. Most of the clothing industry runs on these and they play a pivotal role in the rich cultural position of society. The intricate patterns, complex designs, and transformation from paper to textile that can be done on the loom have come a long way from before. It still has a long way to go and I’m sure that with the quick changing and advancing of the world, the looms will mould too. They will continue to be a symbol of rich culture and tradition which may be dying due to the pace at which this world is heading to technology.
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