Who invented the "Flying Shuttle" in 1738; one of the key developments in the industrialization of weaving?

The story behind the answer

John Kay invented the Flying Shuttle in the 1730s (commonly dated to 1738), a device that let a single weaver throw the shuttle across a wide loom using levers, dramatically speeding up weaving and enabling wider cloth. This leap in productivity created a bottleneck in yarn supply, which helped spark later spinning innovations—James Hargreaves’s Spinning Jenny and Richard Arkwright’s Water Frame. John Deere, by contrast, was a 19th‑century plowmaker.

Remember it this way: Kay made the shuttle “fly” across the loom—Kay = “OK, fly!” That flying shuttle kicked the Industrial Revolution’s textile boom into high gear by turning weaving from a two-person task into a one-person, high-speed operation.