Flying shuttle

In weaving, the weft thread is passed on a shuttle in a to-and-fro movement through the warp threads. The flying shuttle, patented by the Englishman John Kay in 1733, enabled weavers to work more quickly over much wider lengths of fabric. With metal-capped ends and rollers so that it can ‘fly’ along the loom’s beater, it could be propelled rapidly from one side of the loom to the other. Within it there is a bobbin of yarn called the pirn. Spinners and their spinning wheels could not compete with the ‘hunger for thread’, and the race to mechanise was underway. Kay, who had difficulty in collecting royalties for his invention in England, worked in France from 1747 to 1759. Encouraged by the Bureau du Commerce, he installed assortiments, a series of machines for treating and transforming raw fibre into thread, including carding machines and unwinders.