Svaty, Vladimir

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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fl. 1950 Czechoslovakia

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Czech inventor of a loom across which the weft was projected by a jet of water.

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Since the 1930s people have been experimenting with ways of inserting the weft during weaving without using a massive shuttle. This would save wasting the energy that a shuttle requires to accelerate it through the warp and which is only to be lost when the shuttle is stopped in its box. Around 1950, the Czech engineer Vladimir Svaty had been working on air-jet looms, in which the weft was wafted across the loom by a jet of air. He then switched his interest to waterjet looms, and in 1955, at the Brussels exhibition, the first water-jet loom was displayed to a surprised world. In 1959 the Czechs had installed 150 of these looms at Semily in Czechoslovakia, weaving cloth 41 in. (104 cm) wide at 350 picks per minute. Water-jet looms are suitable only for certain types of synthetic fibres which are not affected by the wet. They are compact, quiet, mechanically simple and free from weft vibration. They find their most appropriate use in weaving simple fabrics from water-insensitive, continuous-filament yarn, which they can produce economically and with the highest quality.

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Further Reading

J.J.Vincent, 1980, Shuttleless Looms, Manchester (written with inside knowledge of the problems; the author tried to develop a shuttleless loom himself).

RLH