break through the limitations imposed upon production by the
restricted number of efficient workers in some of the processes
through which the cotton yarn must pass.

But the stimulus which one invention afforded to another gave an
accumulative power to the application of new methods. This is
especially seen in the alternation of inventions in the two chief
processes of spinning and weaving.

Even before the invention of John Kay's Fly Shuttle, which doubled the
quantity of work a weaver could do in a day, we found that spinners
had great difficulties in supplying sufficient yarn to the weavers.
This seems to have applied both to the Lancashire cotton and to the
Yorkshire woollen manufactures. After the fly-shuttle had come into
common use this pressure of demand upon the spinners was obviously
increased, and the most skilful organisation of middleman-clothiers
was unable to supply sufficient quantities of yarn. This economic
consideration directed more and more attention to experiments in
spinning machinery, and so we find that, long before the invention of
the jenny and the water-frame, ingenious men like John Kay of Bury,
Wyatt, Paul, and others had tried many patents for improved spinning.
The great inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright and Crompton enabled
spinning to overtake and outstrip weaving and when, about 1790, steam
began to be applied to considerable numbers of spinning mills, it was
no longer spinning but weaving that was the limiting process in the
manufacture of woollen and cotton cloths.

This strain upon weaving, which had been tightening through the period
of the great spinning improvements, acted as a special incentive to
Cartwright, Horrocks, and others to perfect the power-loom in its
application, first to woollen, then to cotton industries. Not until
well into the nineteenth century, when steam power had been fully
applied by many minor improvements, were the arts of spinning and
weaving brought fully into line. The complete factory, where the
several processes of carding, spinning, weaving (and even dyeing and
finishing), are conducted under the same roof and worked in
correspondence with one another, marks the full transition from the
earlier form of domestic industry, where the family performed with
simple tools their several processes under the domestic roof.[73]

Sec. 6. The history of these textile inventions does a good deal to
dispel the "heroic" theory of invention--that of an ide