Robert Kay (1728–1802) was an English inventor, best known for designing a drop box to improve the capability of weaving looms.
His father emigrated to France in 1747 and was joined there by Robert and two other sons, James and John.
[a] The flying shuttle, also known as the wheel-shuttle, had been invented by John senior around 1733 but his commercial acumen did not match his engineering ingenuity and financial problems may have contributed to the move abroad.
[1] Robert had returned to Bury probably in 1759 and in either that year or 1760,[2] he designed a method for deploying multiple shuttles simultaneously, enabling the use of wefts of more than one colour and so making it easier for the weaver to produce cross-striped material.
[1] The drop box probably caused an increase in the use of the flying shuttle: combining the two made the weaving mechanism more complex, but it greatly increased the production speed of even fairly complex cloths.