Mechanical Dobby...

I still have to clear space for Millie, the AVL loom that arrived yesterday.  However, I think that I can definitely try to reassemble Millie's mechanical dobby mechanism (currently it is set up for the later compu-dobby, but I'd really like to try out the mechanical dobby and explore that for a while).

What's a dobby, you say?

'Dobby' is a contracted form of 'Draw-Boy'.

So then, what's a draw-boy?

To explain this we have to skate back in history a ways, to ancient China.

The Chinese developed a marvelous floor loom that also featured supplemental harnesses to raise threads independently of the harnesses controlling the main woven structure, which you can think of as the matrix of the textile.  These had cords that were raised in sequence in order to lift the pattern harnesses (of which there were many).  The draw-boy sat perched atop the loom and would pull, or draw, the cords according to the sequence which the weaver was calling out.  Pattern sequences were memorized by the weaver (and probably the draw-boy), which I find amazing. 

Draw harnesses evolved from pattern sticks in sequential sheds, which seem to have appeared not only in Asia but in the Americas and in Africa - I can't be sure how this happened, but I have always considered the possibility that pattern sticks were sort of, as Elizabeth Zimmerman would say, un-vented, in different parts of the world.  People are clever.

But the Chinese took this concept further, and invented the draw harness.

It's all binary code, by the way.  Starting with the pattern sticks and people carrying complete pattern sequences around in their heads.  Computers have been with us for a long, long time.

Since binary code lends itself so well to things, it was only a matter of time before somebody recognized that the binary code as used for draw harnesses by a person on top of the loom pulling cords in sequence could be mechanized into something that would do the same thing.  I am not sure when the pin dobby was invented, but it is basically analogous to punch cards, which run the next step towards computers, the Jacquard loom, which was invented sometime in the eighteenth century, though its predecessors in Europe go back to the fifteenth century.  And I seem to recall that some of these earlier iterations used the pin dobby.  It's so simple, really.

So the draw-boy has turned into a mechanical  analog computer.  Since then it has also evolved into a digital computer that runs the pattern sequences and the lifting of the harnesses.  Very wonderfully, Ahrens & Violette engineered a loom which, though modern, use a mechanical dobby.