MANUFACTURE OF TEXTILES 



to the hostile reception given this wonderfully useful 

 invention by the fellow countrymen of Kay; how they 

 rose against him, smashed his machines and workshop 

 and drove him from the county. He was more gra- 

 ciously received in other parts of the country, however, 

 although he never realized any material gain from his 

 invention and died in straitened circumstances a few 

 years later. 



One of his sons, Robert Kay, who inherited the 

 inventive genius of his father, devised what is known 

 as the "drop-box," in 1760. This is an arrangement 

 of several boxes whereby a weaver could insert several 

 colors as stripes across the length of his loom with 

 great facility. By arranging the warp threads in al- 

 ternating colors it was possible by this method to weave 

 checkered effects as easily as single-colored ones. The 

 principle involved in this invention is still in use, and 

 thus John Kay and his son Robert may justly be con- 

 sidered the originators of modern weaving processes. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE POWER-LOOM 



The first attempt at inventing a successful power- 

 loom, or one approaching practicality, seems to have 

 been made by M. de Gennes, an officer in the French 

 Navy. He sent suggestions for such a machine to 

 the Academy of Sciences in 1678, and although it has 

 since been determined that these specifications contained 

 the germ of an idea of a power-loom, nothing of any 

 practical importance came of them. Almost a century 

 later, a countryman of De Gennes M. Vauconson, 



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