The Manchester gentlemen unanimously agreed that the thing was impracticable; and in defence of their opinion they adduced arguments which I certainly was incompetent to answer or even to comprehend, being totally ignorant of the subject, having never at any time seen a person weave.
"I controverted, however, the impracticability of the thing by remarking that there had lately been exhibited in London an automaton figure which played at chess. 'Now you will not assert, gentlemen,' said I, 'that it is more difficult to construct a machine that shall weave than one which shall make all the variety of moves that are required in that complicated game?'"
Automata had already played a significant role in the story of automatic weaving, but this one was, in fact, no such thing. It was four years earlier that Wolfgang von Kempelen, an official at the Viennese court of Maria Therese, had first demonstrated his wooden, life-sized Mechanical Turk, seated behind a cabinet on top of which was a chess set.
The clockwork device was apparently set to play the game, and did it so well that it fooled many people, including the crowned heads of Europe. But the likeliest explanation is that the real player was an ex-Polish soldier named Worousky, who had lost both his legs in battle and therefore could fit comfortably inside the wooden figure. Cartwright, of course, was unaware of this.
He continued: “Some little time afterwards, a particular circumstance recalling this conversation to my mind, it struck me, that, as in plain weaving, according to the conception I then had of the business, there could only be three movements, which were to follow each other in succession, there would be little difficulty in producing and repeating them.
“Full of these ideas, I immediately employed a carpenter and smith to carry them into effect. As soon as the machine was finished, I got a weaver to put in the warp, which was of such materials as sail-cloth is usually made of. To my great delight, a piece of cloth, such as it was, was the produce.
“As I had never before turned my thoughts to any thing mechanical, either in theory or in practice, nor had ever seen a loom at work, or knew any thing of its construction, you will readily suppose that my first Loom must have been a most rude piece of machinery.
THE one he got right: Cartwright's second loom, built after he had investigated how weavers worked, proved a success. The frame on the left held a matrix of bobbins, which served instead of a beam to supply the warp threads.“The warp was placed perpendicularly, the reed fell with a force of at least half a hundredweight, and the springs which threw the shuttle were strong enough to have thrown a Congreve rocket. In short, it required the strength of two powerful men to work the machine at a slow rate, and only for a short time.”
The interesting aspect of this first machine was that Cartwright chose to hang his warp threads in a vertical plane while the handloom, which was in general use throughout the country at that time, worked horizontally. However, he had never seen a modern loom and the likelihood is that he had based his ideas on an illustration in a book.
One possible inspiration was the Indian method, where the operator often slung his warp threads from the overhanging branch of a tamarind tree. But weavers in antiquity also used a vertical frame, and there is every chance that Cartwright, in his days as an Oxford classics student, saw the drawing of a Greek machine in French Benedictine monk Bernard de Montfaucon's 'L'Antiquite Expliquee et Representee en Figures' which was published in 1719. If so, it would make Cartwright's sobriquet of “The British Archimedes” even more apt.
