Talk:Power loom

Major addition of material
I have added some hard fact- there are illustrations to follow. When this is done, there is still more material but I suspect that a bit of pruning will help. --ClemRutter (talk) 22:32, 28 February 2009 (UTC) The M. de Gennes link is broken.. it links to a 20th century person. was there a correct link or stub? Nick Nu (talk) 07:48, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Vague references to warp-dressing?
This paragraph doesn't quite make sense:

''It was not a commercially successful machine. His ideas were licensed first by Grimshaw, of Manchester who built a small steam powered weaving factory in Manchester in 1790, the looms had to be stopped to dress the warp. The factory burnt down before anything could be learnt. A series of inventors incrementally improved all aspects of the three principle processes and the ancillary processes.''

The second sentence is apparently two joined sentences. Did stopping the looms have something to do with the fire? What was it that couldn't be "learnt" because the factory burned down?

A list then appears, which begins:

• Grimshaw 1790 Manchester- dressing the warp

Is this a list of the "improvements" referred to at the end of the preceding paragraph? If so, the sentence beginning "A series of inventors..." should, as an introduction to the list, be a new paragraph and end with a colon. And what's the relation between this first list-entry and the text preceding it, which refers to the same factory and year? These are the kinds of questions people will be asking themselves who don't know the author's intentions. SomeAvailableName (talk) 23:33, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

Current article
Give me some time and I will do a rewrite- the current mosaic of random facts just cannot be tweaked. The problem have stemmed from multiple one-sided sources and a lack of a real overview. There are stubs to be written first before we can pull this together. -- Clem Rutter (talk) 18:52, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Social and economic effects
This section is severely lacking. Most importantly, it does not address the power loom's obvious and numerous positive contributions to economic development. Namely, process innovation in textiles led to a sharp decrease in prices and, along with mass production methods, allowed the common man access to cheap, strong, and widely available clothes. It cites nothing that states definitively that unemployment rose and wages fell. In fact the likely consequences are entirely the opposite. The sheer amount of textiles being created likely required employment to be expanded (spread of industrial English textile mills, much in the same way slavery in the southern US expanded after the invention of the cotton gin), and wages to rise considerably for the new positions, as they were now much more productive. The use of child and women for labor also likely had enormously positive effects on development as it increased total household income. (2602:306:303A:3370:7CD0:345A:970E:DA58 (talk) 23:42, 28 June 2015 (UTC))


 * Big topic- do you fancy having a go? Timmins is a reliable reference- others seem to be POV pushing researcher. I would like more discussion on the move to the Factory system, and how the need for looms stimulated the need for improved iron production and with that steam power. Hard stats on wage levels are needed- its some thing a sociologist would enjoy. The first stage is to gather your references and cull the unreliable ones- (post-grad task I think) then you need an adequate secondary source giving an embracing argument that has not been slaughtered in recent research work.

-- Clem Rutter (talk) 07:08, 29 June 2015 (UTC)