The first machines

Through centuries when textiles were produced in domestic workshops, machinery was widely used and accepted. Much of this apparatus was simple, even crude, in construction, and wood was its chief material. Heavy mechanisms of the public mill – fulling stocks, water-wheels and transmission gear – inhabited another realm, defined as the province of millwrights. Handlooms, spinning wheels, carding engines and other domestic machines were basic devices, hand-powered, produced even into the twentieth century. Frames and certain of the components were made of wood, while moving parts, gears and fittings were generally metallic, usually of iron. Little is documented about who made them, and how.

Oak, beech or ash, though rarely soft wood, were recorded in handlooms in southern English and Midland textile districts. Screws, nuts and bolts might be made of elm or iron, with shuttles and spools carved from solid timber. The tools most commonly used were the lathe and the graver's knife. Tradesmen engaged on this work included turners and wheelwrights (for spinning wheels), carpenters, joiners and locksmiths; and a less clear term, ‘framesmith’, a worker in metal, ‘manufacturer of weaving frames’, apparently associated with the complicated business of building knitting frames. This branch of engineering was sufficiently organized to generate a small yet significant export market during the seventeenth century. More traditional pieces were made by carpenters, turners in wood. Mentioned in the sixteenth century were a ‘turnour or maker of loomes’ in London, and in Canterbury weavers using a ‘turner for framyng of ther lomes’. Weavers, or their masters, might commission or assemble their own loom. It is hard to know how specialized the machine-makers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries might have been, even in centres of cloth-making.

Evidence of users building their own machinery, in whole or part, is sketchy. The will of a Darlington weaver in 1597 mentioned ‘my own linen loom which I wrought myself’.