LOOM AND SPINDLE——HOOPER. 671 
ingenious machine for weaving narrow tape several breadths at a 
time. 
The council, having carefully considered the machine, and bear- 
ing in mind the state of the trade, were “afraid that by this inven- 
tion a great many workmen might be reduced to beggary.” ‘They, 
therefore, mercifully ordered the machine to be suppressed and the 
inventor of it to be privately strangled or drowned! 
The weaving trade has always been divided into two great 
branches. The broad weavers made stuffs for garments and furni- 
ture seldom less than 21 inches wide. The narrow-branch weavers 
make ribbons, laces, tapes, braids, galloons, and such like goods, and 
of course when these were only woven in 
single widths on hand looms vast num- 
bers of persons were employed in weay- 
ing them. There was a great demand 
for such goods in the middle ages. 
Figure 54 (pl. 10) shows a narrow 
weaver at work on a hand loom. I dis- 
covered him the other day in a small 
trimming factory near Piccadilly Cir- 
cus. The loom he is working at is an 
actual survival of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. There are several others in use at 
the same factory, where braids and 
trimmings for high-class furniture are 
always being made. 
Attempts were made at various times 
in the seventeenth century to introduce 
the machine tape loom, but complaints 
and rioting prevented them succeeding. 
It was not until the eighteenth century 
that prohibitions were finally revoked, and the Dutch bar loom, as it 
was called, came into general use. 
An illustration of this loom is given in the great French mechani- 
cal encyclopedia published in 1786. It is reproduced in figure 55. 
The reason why the ribbon loom was so readily made workable by 
power was because it did not require the one movement which has 
always been the great obstacle in the way of weaving broad webs 
on machine looms—that is, the throw of the shuttle. Nay, not so 
much the throw, but the catch of the shuttle. 
Figure 56 shows the graceful operation on which good weaving 
depends, an operation which has never yet been successfully imitated 
by machinery and probably never will be. 
The operations of the loom in weaving are four in number: To 
open the shed, to throw and catch the shuttle, to beat the weft to- 
Fie. 55.—Dutch bar loom. 
