Kissing the shuttle

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.

[9] 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.

The main concern was the risk of spreading diseases, followed closely by injuries to teeth and inhaling dirt and dust into their lungs.

[14] Robert Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus in 1882 and this led to a period of 40 years in which the medical professions debated the means of transmission and tried to assimilate this new knowledge into existing practice.

Koch's hypothesis was that the bacillus was transmitted by dried sputum on dust particles, while a Dr Charles Chapin, the medical officer for Rhode Island, proposed that close physical contact between people was necessary and spitting and kissing were the primary cause of infection.

[15] It was in 1899 that Hermann Biggs, the chief medical officer for New York City determined that transmission was caused by dust or close physical contact.

In Massachusetts, in 1906, it was declared that shuttle kissing was an unwholesome practice because it drew dust cotton lint into the lungs which caused them to spit.

[15] In Lancashire, bacteriology was less advanced and in 1900 it was still believed that 'consumption' (tuberculosis) was not an infectious disease and the contagion was due to sanitation or moral laxity.

A list of diseases said to arise from shuttle kissing was compiled but close study could only find and document five actual cases.

These were a cancer at Oswaldtwistle, tonsillitis at Rawtenstall, three deaths from tuberculosis at Bacup, phthisis at Tyldesley and scarlet fever at Burnley.

The three deaths were examined in detail but no link to shuttle kissing was established and other forms of close contact were equally probable.

[17] In 1918, Mr Middleton Hewat, Preston's Tuberculosis Officer and Assistant Medical Officer of Health, saw that weavers had the highest tuberculosis rate of any cotton operatives, and recommended that hand-threaded shuttles should be introduced, while not mentioning the system used in the Northrop automatic loom which were already operated by Horrocks, Crewdson and Sons in Preston.