Flying Shuttle

The flying shuttle, also called the fly shuttle, is a weaving shuttle fitted so it can be driven along the loom's shuttle race by cords the weaver pulls, rather than thrown by hand from one side of the loom to the other. John Kay patented the device in 1733, and it let a single weaver work cloth wider than a hand thrown shuttle allowed, doing a job that a broad loom had previously needed two weavers working together to do. Its spread through the textile industry by the 1750s was an early step toward the mechanized weaving of the Industrial Revolution and toward the power loom that followed it.