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Updated: May 19, 2025
They receive the most trifling wages, and, with full work, are not in a position to earn more than ten shillings a week. One class of woven goods after another is annexed by the power-loom, and hand-weaving is the last refuge of workers thrown out of employment in other branches, so that the trade is always overcrowded.
To use the phrase of a Nottingham mechanic, "there are machines now that will weave anything, from a piece of sacking to a spider's web." But fine muslins and fancy goods are chiefly woven by hand. The power-loom has recently been adapted, under Bright's patent, to weaving carpets, which are afterwards printed.
Every power-loom weaver detected absenting himself at another time, while the machinery is in motion, forfeits for each hour and each loom, 3d. Every person who leaves the room during working-hours, without obtaining permission from the overlooker, forfeits 3d. 3. Weavers who fail to supply themselves with scissors forfeit, per day, 1d. 4.
Cartwright, a clergyman of Kent, with no previous knowledge of weaving, after an expenditure of 40,000 pounds, invented the power-loom, for which he afterwards received a grant of 10,000 pounds from Parliament. To supply our cotton manufactures, there were imported in 1849 1,900,000 bales of 330lbs. each. Of this quantity, 1,400,000 bales came from the United States.
The power-loom, too, is beginning to appropriate one branch after another of wool and linen-weaving; in Rochdale alone, there are more power than hand-looms in flannel and other wool-weaving branches.
The same process has gone on in the weaving industry; the power-loom has taken possession of one branch of hand-weaving after another, and since it produces much more than the hand-loom, while one weaver can work two looms, it has superseded a multitude of working-people. And in all sorts of manufacture, in flax and wool-spinning, in silk-twisting, the case is the same.
The privileged classes feel to our labor- and money-saving political machinery just as the hand-weavers felt to the inventor and introducers of the power-loom.
Soon after Arkwright's invention of the spinning-frame, Edmund Cartwright invented the power-loom, the idea of which came to him while he was visiting Arkwright's cotton-mills at Cromford. Cartwright took out his first patent in 1785. Within fifty years from that time there were at least one hundred thousand power-looms at work in Great Britain.
Then when power-loom weaving was introduced they went to the mills, and one of them was clever and saved money and built a little mill of his own, and his son built a much larger one, and made a great deal of money, and became Mayor of Leeds. The next generation saw the Tyrrel-Rawdons the largest loom-lords in Yorkshire.
The London Morning Chronicle, in a review of one of his recent compositions, has the following piece of criticism, in contemplation of the present interruption of Mr. James's labors: "A season without two or three novels from Mr. James would be a marked year in the world of letters. There is not a power-loom in all Manchester which works with more untiring, unswerving regularity. Does Mr.
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