Weaving was until quite recently an activity which took place completely by hand. The yarn was spun and the cloth woven without the cold touch of a machine for thousands of years. This seems strange given that it would be useful to make an activity like putting clothes on one's back as efficient a process as possible. But in spite of the fact that grain was ground to flour by mechanical means for most of the Middle Ages, yarn production and weaving were done completely as manual processes until the late Reniassance.
Fiber was hand plucked, and combed and spun by drop spindles in Europe until the traders from the orient brought designs and ideas for hand-turned wheels much like chakras, hand-turned wheels from India. Later, foot-powered spinning wheels were brought from China, but they still used the stop and wind on process of hand spindles turned by a wheel. The flyer wheel (aptly named) was a process worked on by Leonardo DiVinci among others.
Somehow late in the 1400's or early 1500's the flyer wheel appeared on the scene. It was capable of producing the daily output of four hand spindle spinsters. This greatly increased the available spun fiber for cloth. Weaving moved out of the woman's realm in many places, becoming an occupation and livelihood for many men. The hand weavers of the Shetland Islands still produce woven goods on handlooms in much the same way as these late Middle Ages handweavers.
It was not until several hundred years later that Cartwright invented a truly mechanical steam-powered loom. He was not even a weaver himself, but a local clock maker and inventor. By the late 1700's he had patented a steam-driven weaving process which immensely speeded the process of cloth production. The Industrial Age had truly begun.
The effects on the cottage handweaving industry were catastrophic. Cottagers were driven from their land into the city to work in the cloth mills. Specialty weavers like tapestry and brocade weavers hung on until after turn of the century when Jacquard took the old tablet weaving process and adapted it to the mechanical loom. He used cards with holes punched in them -- much like tablet weaving -- to produce elaborately figured fabrics like brocade. When his process was adapted still further to produce lace by machine, the last of the hand production died in the West except for in the far frontier of America and among ethnic populations.
Hand production of fabric became declasse and associated
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