In weaving, a drop box or dropbox is a housing for a shuttle, invented in 1759 or 1760 by Robert Kay (1727-1802) in

Bury, Lancashire Bury ( ) is a market town on the River Irwell in Greater Manchester, England. Metropolitan Borough of Bury is administered from the town, which had an estimated population of 78,723 in 2015. The town is within the Historic counties of Englan ...

. The box sits beside a

loom A loom is a device used to weave cloth and tapestry. The basic purpose of any loom is to hold the warp threads under tension to facilitate the interweaving of the weft threads. The precise shape of the loom and its mechanics may vary, but th ...

and allows one to rapidly switch between two shuttles with bobbins, usually of different colors, making it easier and quicker to weave multiple colors for figured fabrics or striped wefts without stopping to manually change shuttles. The drop box consists of a partitioned lift mechanism at one end of the loom, of which any section can be lowered to the working height of the loom so that the shuttle can be loaded. Whilst the drop box made weaving equipment significantly more complex and expensive, it made the process much faster and contributed to a greater uptake of the

flying shuttle The flying shuttle was one of the key developments in the industrialization of weaving during the early Industrial Revolution. It allowed a single weaver to weave much wider fabrics, and it could be mechanized, allowing for automatic machine l ...

which was invented by Robert Kay's father John Kay. The drop box was never patented.

References

{{reflist Weaving