Background
James Lyall was born on September 13, 1836 in Auchterardar, Perth, Scotland, the son of Charles and Mary (Cooper) Lyall. When he was three years old his parents came to the United States and settled in New York City.
James Lyall was born on September 13, 1836 in Auchterardar, Perth, Scotland, the son of Charles and Mary (Cooper) Lyall. When he was three years old his parents came to the United States and settled in New York City.
Lyall was educated in the public schools in New York City.
Lyall went to work in his father's shop, making and mounting Jacquard looms. On the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted in the 12th New York Infantry and served for a short time in the defense of the national capital. In 1863, while still in the service, he prepared a new substance for enameling cloth, and the government awarded him a large contract to supply enameled haversacks and knapsacks. Following the completion of this work, he and his brother William founded the firm of J. & W. Lyall, for the manufacture of looms and other cotton-making machinery.
On August 11, 1868, he obtained the basic patent on his positive-motion loom. This loom he further perfected with two additional inventions, patented July 4, 1871, and December 10, 1872. Its special feature lies in the fact that the shuttle is not thrown as a projectile through the wedge-shaped space between the two sets of warp threads, but is positively dragged back and forth by an endless belt attached to the shuttle carriage, running first in one direction and then in the other. Besides attending to the enormous business resulting from this invention, Lyall found time to make other improvements in textile machinery, including a new take-up motion for looms, patented in 1875 and 1877, and a cap press for compressing cotton on the shuttles.
In the eighties he established mills for manufacturing cotton and jute goods. These included the Chelsea Jute Mills, New York; the Planet Cotton Mills, Brooklyn; the United States Corset Company, New York, which manufactured the first machine-made corsets in the world; and the Brighton Mills, established in New York and later moved to Passaic, New Jersey. He also patented, in 1888 and 1889, two improvements in the manufacture of jute binder twine. Between 1893 and 1896 he obtained five patents for a new kind of woven fabric for pneumatic tires and fire hose. Its peculiarity lay in the fact that both warp and filling threads were of the same length, thus overcoming the squirming tendency of hose or tires consisting of fabric woven with threads of unequal length. Finally, in 1897, he invented a "tubular wheel tire, " the cotton fabric of which was made with a large number of warp threads and very few filling threads per inch.
Lyall was married on September 8, 1864, to Margaret Telford of Meredith Hollow, near Delphi, New York. He was survived by his wife and five children.