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34 W o r c e s t e r 3 0 0 : C i t y o f I n n o v a t o r s 1822-1921 T he invention of the mechanized loom revolutionized textile manufacture in a way that's so endemic today that its significance can be overlooked. Not so in the 19th century. e loom liberated (or displaced) a huge component of human labor, particularly that of women, whose ripple effects are still felt today. One of the milestones was the development of the Crompton Loom. "Textiles could be produced faster than before the industrial revolution and inventors like Crompton were constantly improving machinery to be state of the art; his invention doubled productivity of previous looms of that time," said Kira Holmes, executive director of e Mill Museum in Willimantic, Conn. e basic hand loom, a relatively simple machine Crompton's revolutionary loom created wealth by the yard invented in antiquity, made the production of cloth from yarns and threads practical, but the process remained slow and labor intensive. In the 18th century, especially in the British Isles, advances in machinery and the first application of external power, oen a water wheel, started the revolution, which spread within a few years to North America. An important 19th century innovator was William Crompton, a Lancashire émigré who invented and patented an important loom improvement in Massachusetts. He died a few years later, leaving his young son George Crompton to carry on. George combined mechanical skills with business acumen and eventually greatly improved the speed and quality of operations, creating the Crompton High Speed Loom, which was able to produce complex designs because of its 24 harnesses to control the positioning of the warp and three boxes at each side of the loom, supporting the use of multiple shuttles, which would typically each carry different color or type of yarn for the we dimension of fabric. e Crompton Loom doubled the fastest speed of earlier looms in terms of traverses of the shuttle across the loom width, from about 45 picks per minute to some 85 picks per minute. Additional aspects of his loom reportedly made it Warp speed e Crompton Loom could more or less double the productivity of a given facility and workforce. Crompton and licensees produced them in enormous numbers throughout the following decades. Crompton Loom Works revolutionized textile manufacturing. Image | Worcester Public Library