Textiles: Did you mean...?

An Inca royal tunic with the typical geometrical designs and colours favoured by Inca weavers. (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collections, Washington D.C.)

A model of a spinning jenny. The machine was invented in Lancashire in 1765 by James Hargreaves (1720-1778). The machine ('jenny') was capable of spinning multiple threads simultaneously and was one of the first important...

Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule in 1779, which greatly increased the speed of spinning yarn for textile production. It made finer and more uniform yarn than previous machines and had many more spindles, up to...

A detail from an Inca textile showing a geometric cross design. (Museo de America, Madrid)

An Inca textile bag with typical tassle decoration. (Lombards Museum)

The power loom was first invented by Edmund Cartwright in 1785 and it doubled the speed of textile production compared to traditional methods. (The American Textile Museum, Lowell, Mass., USA)

A flying shuttle, used in the textile industry to pull thread (weft) horizontally across longitudinal threads (the warp) on a weaving frame. The device was invented by John Kay in 1733 and greatly speeded up textile production...

A diagram showing a cross-section of a cast-iron loom powered by steam as invented by Richard Roberts (1789-1864) in 1822. The diagram illustrates the importance of clock-working engineering in textile mechanization...

A detail of a Chimu cloth from a mantle, 1100-1470 CE. (Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru)

An example of a water frame (a machine for spinning cotton) as invented by Richard Arkwright in Nottinghamshire in 1769. It was powered by a water wheel and increased the speed that yarn could be spun. (Science Museum, London...