Textiles and Fiber Arts as Catalysts for Ideas

Once heddles were invented, loom weaving spread rapidly, spawning different types of looms. Narrow band-looms must have come first, then wider ones, with the warp stretched horizontally (as in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Southeast Asia), vertically (Syria), or aslant (Europe and Central and South America), and tensioned with twin beams (Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Syria), weights (Europe), or the body (China, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America) (see Figs. 2, 4, 5, and 10). On all these early looms, the heddle bars—of which there might be several, for patterning—had to be shifted by hand to change the sheds.

The next conceptual development was to rig up pulley-linked treadles to use the feet for changing sheds, thereby freeing the hands to manipulate the weft more efficiently. Our first evidence for treadled looms comes in a manuscript of 1200. It shows the weft carried in a true shuttle (Fig. 6) rather than on a simple stick bobbin (as in Figs. 2 and 10). With the flick of one hand, this boat-shaped device can be shot rapidly through the wide-open shed—lightly supported on the horizontal warp as it passes across—and caught with the other hand, ready for the return shot a moment later when the stomp of one foot changes the shed. Again the new ideas, possibly inspired by information about Chinese practices, helped speed the work enormously.

To produce the elaborate silk brocades Chinese customers wanted, weavers eventually developed a system of pulling ("drawing") the pattern heddles up by means of strings attached to special heddle bars that caught up the requisite threads for each row of the pattern. Called the draw-loom, this extremely complicated Figure 5. Woman weaving on a foot-tensioned backstrap loom. From a figurine on top of bronze Chinese vessel, Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). device required both a weaver to insert the variously colored wefts and a "draw-boy" (or -girl) perched above the loom to pull the strings. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, with fancy brocades in high demand in Europe, a French inventor from Lyon (center of the European silk industry), J. M. Jacquard, figured out how to mechanize the draw-loom process by punching onto cards the information about which heddles to raise for each successive row of the pattern (Fig. 7). The information was picked up mechanically, since the needles that slid through holes in a given card caused iron bars to lift hooks attached to the heddles. This idea of punch-hole patterns to encode and store information, already used in Lyon for simpler textile mechanization by 1730, facilitated the development of data storage and control mechanisms in the later nineteenth century, leading ultimately to the twentieth-century computer.