3 o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the industry and have been recognized throughout the manufact- 

 uring world. Not only did two distinguished Americans, Francis 

 C. Lowell and Patrick T. Jackson, practically reinvent the power- 

 loom, in 1813, as applied to cotton goods, but another, an adopted 

 citizen, William Crompton, first adapted the power-loom to the 

 weaving of fancy woolen fabrics, and to-day the two principal 



Fig. 21. Hand-loom of 1750. (From Hogarth's Two Apprentices.) 



makes of American looms, the Crompton and the Knowles, are 

 generally recognized as superior to any foreign patterns and are 

 largely used in foreign mills.* Crompton's fancy power-loom 

 was applied to woolen fabrics in 1840. "Not a yard of fancy 

 woolen fabrics had ever been woven by a power-loom in any 

 country," wrote Samuel Lawrence, " until it was done by William 

 Crompton at the Middlesex Mills, in Lowell, in 1840." It was af- 

 firmed before a congressional committee in 1878 that " upon a 

 Crompton loom, or looms based upon it, are woven every yard of 

 fancy cloth in the world." The importance of this contribution 

 to the wool manufacture can only be appreciated in connection 

 with the fact that three quarters of all the woolen cloths now 

 worn are woven upon fancy looms. Up to that time it had been 



* Over eight thousand of the Knowles open-shed fancy looms are now in operation in 



England. 



