This “Bobbin Battery” doesn’t belong here! Just pretend you don’t notice the one that’s on each loom as you look around our weave room.

The bobbin battery was invented around 1900, well after the time of this story. A bobbin battery is loaded with 28 bobbins, the wooden device that holds the thread in the shuttle. It automatically inserts a full bobbin into a narrow wooden shuttle, which carries the threads back and forth across the loom at a very fast rate of speed.

In the 1840s, every time a bobbin was close to running out of thread, a weaver would have to shut off the machine, take out the shuttle and replace the empty bobbin with a full one. The hardest part was getting the new thread through the hole or “eye” of the shuttle. Weavers often did this by holding the shuttle up to their mouths and sucking the thread through. This was sometimes called “the kiss of death,” because germs spread so easily through the shuttles and bobbins. When the bobbin battery was invented and installed, the weave room needed fewer workers and many people lost their jobs.