John Kay

English inventor

• Born: July 16, 1704
• Birthplace: Walmersley, near Bury, Lancashire, England
• Died: c. 1780-1781
• Place of death: France

Kay invented the flying shuttle that helped mechanize the process of weaving, contributing to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.

Early Life

The early life of John Kay is obscure. According to documented evidence, he was born the youngest of the five children of Robert Kay of Park and Ellin Entwisle of Quarlton. John Kay’s father was a yeoman farmer, rather than a woolen manufacturer as claimed by some biographies, who died a few months before his son was born. The father provided a modest inheritance for all of his children and a small amount for their education. Reared by his mother and her brother, William Entwisle, John Kay was close to his older brothers. Some biographies claim that Kay was educated on the Continent, but there is little to support that contention, for the provisions of his father’s will were not sufficient to send any of the children abroad.

Kay was apprenticed to learn the trade of a reed maker. Reeds were used in the process of weaving thread into cloth, which was an important industry in Lancashire. In the horizontal hand loom, which had become standard in Great Britain, a series of threads, called the warp, were drawn out parallel to one another with alternate threads being lifted vertically by a pair of heddles to form a triangular open area called the shed. Another thread, called the weft, was then passed through the shed from one side to the other. In the next step, the warp threads that the weft had passed over were now raised and the alternate threads lowered, resulting in the weft thread being woven through the warp. In such looms, a reed, or comb, came between the warp threads and was used to press, or beat, the weft threads close together to make the cloth firm and tight.

Kay was a self-confident, some say arrogant, youth with a great mechanical aptitude. Before the age of twenty-one, he was established as a reed maker in his hometown of Park and had begun to invent improvements for the loom. While producing traditional reeds out of cane, Kay began to improve the reeds by making them out of thin polished blades of iron. Although he did not have enough money to patent his idea, his longer-lasting metal reeds soon were in great demand. On June 29, 1735, with his career as a reed maker assured, Kay married Anne Holte, the daughter of a neighbor, John Holte of Bury, and established a home in Park. The marriage would produce twelve children. Although he made trips to Colchester and Leeds to sell his reeds, Kay continued to reside in Park until 1753.

Life’s Work

John Kay’s most significant invention came in 1733, when he patented his flying or fly shuttle (or wheeled shuttle). Before his invention, weavers attached the weft thread to a piece of wood, called a shuttle, and had to pass it back and forth through the warp by hand. After each pass, the weaver had to change hand positions to beat the weft with a reed. Weaving broadcloth required two workers to throw the shuttle to each other. Because of this, weaving was both slow and expensive.

Kay’s improvement for the loom consisted of a shuttle on wheels, which could run along a race-board attached to the reed. The shuttle was propelled from side to side by devices called dummy-hands, or pickers, at each side of the loom. These pickers could be controlled by the weaver using one hand to pull on a single cord at the center of the loom. With Kay’s invention, a weaver could double his or her output because one hand could control the shuttle while the other hand could beat the weft. Also, a weaver could weave broadcloth without the help of an extra worker. Because of the speed with which weaving could be done, the invention came to be known as a flying shuttle.

Although the flying shuttle became quite popular among textile manufacturers, its invention brought Kay neither fame nor fortune. Many manufacturers secretly installed the devices on their looms so that they would not have to pay Kay royalties. Other manufacturers became much more open in their defiance of Kay’s patent. Between 1738 and 1745, several woolen manufacturers in Yorkshire organized what they called the Shuttle Club to defray the cost of lawsuits brought against them by Kay for infringement of his patent. Kay petitioned the government several times for help in enforcing his patent but received no response. During 1744-1745, he became involved in several lawsuits in Leeds over the use of his flying shuttle. The cost of these lawsuits nearly ruined Kay financially.

Other problems grew for Kay. While the flying shuttle had become popular with woolen manufacturers, the workers were strongly opposed to the new invention. Because a single weaver using a flying shuttle could produce as much cloth as two weavers using the old hand shuttle, the workers believed that Kay’s invention would lead to unemployment for as much as half of the work force. Some workers using the flying shuttle loitered and spoiled their work so that the manufacturers would not realize the advantage of the invention. In other areas, mobs of workers seized and burned the new shuttles. In 1753, a mob from Bury marched on Kay’s house with the intention of killing him. Kay narrowly escaped with his life, but the contents of his house were destroyed.

In 1764, Kay wrote a letter to the Society of Arts and Manufactures stating that he had many more ideas for inventions but that he would not make them public because of the bad treatment he had received in England. In the same year, his son Robert wrote to the society in an attempt to get some reward for his father, but he was also turned down. Because of his treatment in England, Kay moved to France in 1765, where he assisted the French in adapting recently smuggled English machinery to the textile industry. A year later Kay returned to England, encouraged by the British ambassador to Paris, in the hope of receiving some financial reward from the British government for his invention, but again he was ignored and again he left for France, where he lived the rest of his life, accompanied only by his daughter Ann. There is no record of his death or burial place, only some evidence that he died during the winter of 1780-1781.

Kay’s son Robert carried on the reed and shuttle business in Bury and improved the use of the flying shuttle by inventing the drop box, which allowed several different shuttles, each with different colors or different types of weft, to be used on a single loom.

Significance

John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle made a significant contribution to the mechanization of the textile industry and helped that industry play a fundamental role in the Industrial Revolution. The transformation of the textile industry from a decentralized cottage system based on hand-powered looms and spinning wheels to a centralized factory system based on water-powered machinery became a model for manufacturers in other areas of the economy.

The flying shuttle allowed weavers to produce greater quantities of cloth, increasing the demand for yarn and thread. That is, a technological imbalance was created that put pressure on the spinners to develop new machinery to keep pace with the weavers. James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny in 1764 was one result, followed by Sir Richard Arkwright’s water-frame in 1769 and Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule in 1779. These inventions mechanized the spinning of thread and in turn put new pressure on manufacturers to develop a water-powered loom. The essential problem of mechanizing weaving had been solved by Kay’s flying shuttle, but it took several years before a workable power loom was perfected. Edmund Cartwright’s steam-powered loom, patented in 1785, was eventually perfected by Richard Roberts in 1822.

The flying shuttle helped to set into motion a series of events that transformed the textile industry. Not only did John Kay’s invention lead to the mechanization of the production of textiles, but, as foreseen by the textile workers in Kay’s own time, it also had widespread and long-lasting social effects, none of which had been anticipated by Kay.

Bibliography

Addy, John. The Textile Revolution. London: Longmans, Green, 1976. Discusses Kay’s role in terms of the changes taking place in the textile industry. Includes an analysis of the social effects of Kay’s invention. Contains a useful set of historical documents relating to the textile revolution.

Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures: Industry, Innovation, and Work in Britain, 1700-1820. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 1994. Excellent survey of eighteenth century British industry. Although it includes only a mention of Kay, it features two chapters on the country’s textile industry during Kay’s lifetime.

Cardwell, D. S. L. Turning Points in Western Technology. New York: Science History, 1972. Analyzes the technological significance of Kay’s invention and discusses the role of the textile industry in the Industrial Revolution.

Hills, Richard L. Power in the Industrial Revolution. New York: August M. Kelley, 1970. Provides an analysis of the application of power to the textile industry and includes a discussion of Kay’s contributions.

Lord, John. Memoir of John Kay of Bury. Rochdale, England: James Clegg, 1903. Gives a detailed and documented account of the known facts of Kay’s life. Disproves several myths concerning Kay and contains genealogical records concerning Kay and his family.

Usher, Abbot Payson. “The Textile Industry, 1750-1830.” In Technology in Western Civilization, edited by Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell, Jr. Vol. 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Provides a good overview of the industrialization of the textile industry and Kay’s role in its transformation from a domestic system to a factory system.