Flying Shuttle

The flying shuttle is a mechanized weaving shuttle that let a single weaver operate a loom that had previously needed one weaver on each side to pass the shuttle back and forth, and it made it practical to weave much wider fabrics than before. The English inventor John Kay patented the device in 1733, and its adoption sharply cut the labor a broad-cloth loom required while speeding up weaving considerably; by the 1750s the flying shuttle was in widespread use, and because a single weaver could now do the work that four spinners had previously kept supplied with thread, its spread badly strained the textile industry's supply of spun yarn. That imbalance between fast mechanized weaving and slower hand spinning was a direct spur to the spinning inventions of the following decades, and the flying shuttle's mechanical principles also opened the way to fully automatic power looms.