††††It is only relatively recently that weaving has been mechanised. Hand looms are still used in many societies, including the weaving of tweeds in the British Isles. In the hand-loom era, the last of a series of inventions designed to produce complicated designs was the Jacquard loom, perfected in 1805. This was an automatic loom that controlled the operation with the use of punched cards.
Today most fabric is woven in factories using mechanical looms. These power-driven looms can make thousands of metres of fabric a day. The power loom was essentially the invention of an English clergyman Dr. Edmund Cartwright.
Cartwright's first weaving machine, built with the help of a local mechanic, wove cloth and was power-driven. But ir required two strong men to turn it, and they tired after only two hours. In his next attempt Cartwright studied a hand loom and copied the actions of loom and weaver. This machine he patented in 1786, and two improvised versions followed in the next two years. The main problem Cartwright had solved was how to convert the rotary motion of the power source - whether steam engine or waterwheel - to the up-and-down actions required in the loom.
