Historic weaving
Virginia Postrel recounts the story of cloth making in her wonderful 2020 book The Fabric of Civilization. If the twisting of fibers together to make thread is so ancient as to defy an estimated starting point, so is the idea of weaving. Our prehistoric ancestors certainly knew how to weave grasses and twigs together to make objects such as mats or baskets that provided material strength and flexibility. The idea of doing so with the threads made from spinning is presumed to have derived from it.
Ancient Egyptians wove flax together to make cloth—and a great deal of it survives thanks to the burial culture of mummification. The ancient Chinese independently developed weaving very early on. And so did prehistoric civilizations in the Americas, as evidenced by artifacts uncovered in coastal Peru dating back some 6000 years ago.
Woven fabric was a trade good, and the once patterns in the fabrics were copied by distant weavers, the technologies used to produce those patterns spread. The perpetual demand for woven textiles inspired innovations in weaving (as well as all stages of thread-making) that increased the amount of automation involved. Thus, we went from the state-of-the-art weaving technology at the founding of the United States—here at Mt. Vernon:
to the modern weaving technology that blasts air jets in place of the physical weft shuttle passed back and forth in the loom.
This last one is all the more astounding when you consider the many layers of innovation behind the equipment alone. Similar technological progress was required for the threads used that have to be of high quality and consistency beyond the abilities of hand spinners. In fact, even the ancient Egyptians weaving fabric from linen enjoyed generations of innovations prior to their work: the flax had to be bred to produce more and longer fibers that lent themselves better to spinning into yarn.
So there you have it: Knock yourselves out, punsters!
German compound words for the day (it's a 2-fer):
leistungsfähigsten Flugabwehrsysteme = most powerful anti-aircraft systems
https://www.nzz.ch/international/krieg-gegen-die-ukraine
https://translate.google.com
Now I must finish my Christmas cards!
About the weather, I have a suggestion. While "news" outlets talk about each storm as being the storm of the century, I always get weather info from weather.gov. NOAA is not trying to win market share or get clicks by hyping the forecast. Go to weather.gov and put in your zip code for weather forecasts without the hype.