Kissing the shuttle

"Kissing the shuttle" is the term for a process by which weavers used their mouths to pull thread through the eye of a shuttle when the pirn was replaced. The same shuttles were used by many weavers, and the practice was unpopular. It was outlawed in the U.S. state of Massachusetts in 1911 but continued even after it had been outlawed in Lancashire, England in 1952. The Lancashire cotton industry was loath to invest in hand-threaded shuttles, or in the more productive Northrop automatic looms with self-threading shuttles, which were introduced in 1902.

For 100 years the weaving sheds of Lancashire had been equipped with cast iron constructed looms not dissimilar to the original Roberts loom, invented by Richard Roberts. They were driven by leather belts from line shafts. They were closely packed together in pairs separated a narrow alley. One weaver was responsible for four looms; it was her duty (they were almost always girls or women) to replace the weft in the shuttle when it ran out. The weft was wound onto a removable holder called a pirn which was held in the middle of the shuttle. The weaver stopped the loom, found the shuttle, removed it, and bent the shuttle peg holding the pirn towards her, removed the pirn and replaced it with a fresh one. The shuttle had a hole at the end, known as the eye, through which the weft passed. She placed a loop of thread next to the inside edge of the eye and in an operation called "Kissing the shuttle", sucked it through. The shuttle was ready. It was placed back in the sley, All loose threads cut off and removed. A final check was made and the loom was restarted. A typical loom operated at 220 picks per minute and the weaver was paid by the piece. The weaver was adept at balancing her work, keeping all the looms working, so only one would be stopped for replenishment at one time. Labour costs were a significant proportion of the cost of producing cloth.

Shuttles were constructed from a dense heavy hardwood with metal tips. The wood was traditionally sourced from a box tree. Imported timbers such as persimmon and cornel were also commonly used. The shuttle was shaped and hollowed using conventional wood working techniques, and the metal tips are pressed onto the block. Strips of fox fur or similar were stuck to the inside of a shuttle to stop the thread ballooning as it left the pirn. There are many designs of shuttle. The Pemberton Loom needed a shuttle with a hinged shuttle-peg to hold the pirn; the later Draper loom shuttles clasped metal rings on the head of the pirn using a spring steel clip. The Draper Company claimed it had developed over 5000 different types of shuttle to meet "the needs of the mills and the whims of the weavers".

The eye of the shuttle was often made of porcelain. The thread from the pirn had to be led through the eye before it could be used. The fastest way to do this was to suck it through.

The eye of this shuttle was not a closed ring. Patented methods were used to enable the weft to be threaded into the eye, the challenges were production cost, maintaining production speed both in the speed it would run and the time needed to thread it and doff it.

Metcalfs self threading shuttle was gripped the metal ringed pirn using a spring clip that engaged with the rings. The depleted pirn was then automatically rewound while a new pirn was pressed into the clips and the trailing thread clipped into the complex eye.

Shuttle kissing was widely opposed by weavers who thought it led to byssinosis, a lung disease caused by cotton fibres lodging in the air passages. Shuttles were shared and would be kissed by several weavers and tacklers. They were grimy, and the use of lipstick rendered them sticky. A piece of rabbit fur was a component of the shuttle, harbouring additional pathogens.

In United States, Board of Health physicians agreed that there was a potential risk of spreading disease, and united, persuaded the state legislature in Massachusetts to enact reform. In Lancashire medical opinion remained divided and no legislation was passed.