The Hand Loom
First brought to England by the Romans about 2,000 years ago the hand loom continually changed the way weavers thought about the production of cloth. Before England’s industrial revolution started, it took about twelve spinners to make enough thread to keep one weaver busy. [3] As Mary Strickland stated in Edmund Cartwright’s memoir, the cloth had “to be produced by the hands and feet of the workman, without the aid of any intermediate instrument.” [4]
Weavers thought that their job could not be mechanized, [5] but even with the invention of the flying shuttle, it was not enough to deal with the amount of cloth that was needed to be produced. Not long after, people that wanted to weave had no other choice then to work in a mill.
