Rapier Loom

A rapier loom is a shuttleless weaving machine that carries the weft yarn across the loom using rigid or flexible finger-like carriers called rapiers, drawing thread from a stationary supply package rather than firing a shuttle back and forth through the shed of warp threads. Some designs use a pair of rapiers, each carrying the yarn halfway across the fabric to meet at the center, which speeds up each pick and allows wider fabric than a single-rapier design. The English inventor John Smith of Salford patented the first shuttle-eliminating carrier mechanism in 1844, and further patents followed from Phillippe and Maurice in 1855, W.S. Laycock in 1869 and W. Glover in 1874, before O. Hallensleben perfected a rigid rapier design by 1899; John Gabler's 1922 patent for transferring the yarn loop in the middle of the shed and the Spanish inventor R.G. Moya's 1925 flexible rapier were the last major advances before the design became commercially widespread in the 1950s and 1960s.