Page 44 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

textiles 1821

The loom with the most complicated control over tionized figured-silk weaving, as well as the production
warp patterning was developed in the Middle East and of carpets, imitation Kashmir shawls, coverlets, knits,
Far East, although the Chinese often receive credit for and machine-made laces. Lyon apartment houses with
it. The operation of this loom, called a drawloom, excessively tall ceilings on the top floors reflect the
required two people: One controlled the frames or har- height and light requirements of these looms.This early
nesses that held the heddles to make a plain-weave base computerized system used a series of punched cards
structure and inserted the weft yarns; the other sat that determined which warp yarns were raised to create
above the loom to control the patterning warps. This a pattern.This basic system provides control for looms,
second person was often a child (and child labor has lace, and knitting machines today.
been prevalent worldwide in the textile industry—in Jacquard’s invention also affected the production of
homes, workshops, and mills. lace, first made by hand in the sixteenth century. Like
figured silks, bobbin and needle laces reflected con-
Damask, Jacquard, spicuous consumption by the wealthy. The English
and Lace development of machines to make knits (sixteenth cen-
Tapestry-woven fabrics, such as cashmere shawls from tury) and fine net (late eighteenth century) came before
Kashmir, are very labor intensive and cannot be made more complicated equipment that imitated handmade
by machines.Weaving mechanically controlled patterns lace. Leavers lace machines with Jacquard attachments
required less time than tapestry weaving and produced made the best imitations and still do today in England,
a very marketable product, particularly if made of silk. France, and Rhode Island. Raschel knitting machines
For a thousand years, Chinese, Japanese, Syrian, Byzan- make the least expensive modern laces, which are
tine, and Persian workshops produced exotic figured not as durable as other laces because of their looped
silks on variations of the drawloom. Competition from construction.
Palermo, Sicily, and Lucca, Italy, by the thirteenth cen-
tury introduced fabrics that evolved into the luxurious
velvets of the Italian Renaissance from Florence and
other Italian city-states. Many of these fabrics are por-
trayed in fifteenth-century paintings and tapestries.The
Italians dominated figured-silk production through the
sixteenth century, when instead of velvets, fashionable
silks had patterns created by colored supplementary
weft yarns. Under the guidance of Jean-Baptist Colbert,
finance minister under Louis XIV, drawloom weaving in
Lyon expanded. By the eighteenth century Lyon’s
damasks and brocaded fabrics surpassed Italian pro-
duction, with some competition from weavers in Spi-
talfields outside of London. Many Spitalfields textile
workers had fled persecution after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes in France, and the demise of textile pro-
duction in Palermo, Spain, and Flanders were also the
result of worker migration caused by political unrest
and religious persecution. Jacquard attachments on A loom of the type commonly used in the
looms, a nineteenth century English invention, revolu- sixteenth century.