Dobby Loom

A dobby loom is a floor loom that raises and lowers multiple harness shafts together, in patterns set in advance, using a mechanism called a dobby, producing small geometric weave patterns more intricate than a plain treadle loom can manage while remaining simpler and less flexible than a Jacquard loom, which controls individual warp threads rather than whole shafts. The dobby emerged around 1843, roughly four decades after Joseph Marie Jacquard's own device, and takes its name from draw boy, the older term for the assistant who once pulled the draw cords of a drawloom by hand. Early dobby mechanisms used a chain of wooden pegs or bars to encode the weave pattern and mechanically select which shafts rose on each pass of the shuttle; later electronic dobby looms replace the peg chain with computer-controlled solenoids that select shafts electronically, but the underlying principle of shaft-level rather than thread-level pattern control is unchanged.