Why was the invention of the Flying Shuttle described as creating a 'Weaving Lag' initially?
Answer
Weavers could produce wider or faster fabric, outpacing the manual spinners supplying yarn.
The term 'Weaving Lag' or the resulting chaos refers to the severe imbalance caused by John Kay's Flying Shuttle. Kay's invention allowed weavers to drastically speed up the process of passing the weft thread through the warp, either by working faster on standard widths or by weaving wider cloth that required more thread per unit time. The existing technology for yarn preparation, centered around individual spinners working manually, could not meet this suddenly escalated demand for yarn. This dynamic meant that the weaving stage, now accelerated, became bottlenecked by the slow supply from the spinning stage.
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