Inventions in the Century

CHAPTER XVIII.

TEXTILES

Spinning: – A bunch of combed fibre fixed in the forked end of a stick called a distaff, held under the left arm, while with the right forefinger and thumb the housewife or maiden deftly drew out and twisted a thread of yarn of the fibre and wound it upon a stick called a spindle, was the art of spinning that came down to Europe from Ancient Egypt or India without a change through all the centuries to at least the middle of the fourteenth century, and in England to the time of Henry VIII. Then the spinning wheel was introduced, which is said to have also been long in use in India. By the use of the wheel the spindle was no longer held in the hand, but, set upon a frame and connected by a cord or belt to the wheel, was made to whirl by turning the wheel by hand, or by a treadle. The spindle was connected to the bunch of cotton by a cord, or by a single roving of cotton or wool attached to the spindle, which was held between the finger and thumb, and as the spindle revolved the thread was drawn out and twisted and wound by the spindle upon itself.

In the cloth of the ancient East the warp and weft were both of cotton. In England the warp was linen and the weft was cotton. The warp was made by the cloth and linen manufacturers, and the weft yarns furnished by the woman spinsters throughout the country. By both these methods only a single thread at a time was spun. The principle of the spinning operation, the drawing out and twisting a thread or cord from a bunch or roll of fibre, has remained the same through all time.

The light and delicate work, the pure and soft material, and the beauty and usefulness of raiments produced, have all through time made woman the natural goddess, the priestess, the patroness, and the votary of this art. The object of all modern machinery, however complicated or wonderful, has simply been to increase the speed and efficiency of the ancient mode of operation and to multiply its results. The loom, that antique frame on which the threads were laid in one direction to form the warp, and crossed by the yarns in the opposite direction, carried through the warp by the shuttle thrown by hand, to form the woof, or weft, comprised a device as old as, if not older than, the distaff and spindle.

The ancient and isolated races of Mexico had also learned the art of spinning and weaving. When the Spaniards first entered that country they found the natives clothed in cotton, woven plain, or in many colours.

After forty centuries of unchanged life, it occurred to John Kay of Bury, England, that the weaving process might be improved. In 1733 he had succeeded in inventing the picker motion, "picker peg," or "fly." This consisted of mechanical means for throwing the shuttle across the web by a sudden jerk of a bar – one at each side – operated by pulling a cord. He could thus throw the shuttle farther and quicker than by hand – make wider cloth, and do as much work in the same time as two men had done before. This improvement put weaving ahead of spinning, and the weavers were continually calling on the spindlers for more weft yarns. This set the wits of inventors at work to better the spinning means.

At the same time that Kay was struggling with his invention of the flying shuttle, another poor man, but with less success, had conceived another idea, as to spinning. John Wyatt of Lichfield thought it would be a good thing to draw out the sliver of cotton or wool between two sets of rollers, one end of the sliver being held and fed by one set of rollers, while the opposite end was being drawn by the other set of rollers moving at a greater speed. His invention, although not then used, was patented in 1738 by Lewis Paul, who in time won a fortune by it, while Wyatt died poor, and it was claimed that Paul and not Wyatt was the true inventor.

About 1764 a little accident occurring in the home of James Hargreaves, an English weaver of Blackburn, suggested to that observant person an invention that was as important as that of Kay. He was studying hard how to get up a machine to meet the weavers' demands for cotton yarns. One day while Hargreaves was spinning, surrounded by his children, one of them upset the spinning wheel, probably in a children's frolic, and after it fell and while lying in a horizontal position, with the spindle in a vertical position, and the wheel and the spindle still running, the idea flashed into Hargreaves' mind that a number of spindles might be placed upright and run from the same power. Thus prompted he commenced work, working in secret and at odd hours, and finally, after two or three years, completed a crude machine, which he called the spinning jenny, some say after his wife, and others that the name came from "gin," the common abbreviated name of an engine. This machine had eight or ten spindles driven by cords or belts from the same wheel, and operated by hand or foot. The rovings at one end were attached to the spindles and their opposite portions held together and drawn out by a clasp held in the hand. When the thread yarn was drawn out sufficiently it was wound upon the spindles by a reverse movement of the wheel. Thus finally were means provided to supply the demand for the weft yarns. One person with one of Hargreaves' machines could in the same time spin as much as twenty or thirty persons with their wheels. But those who were to be most benefited by the invention were the most alarmed, for fear of the destruction of their business, and they arose in their wrath, and demolished Hargreaves' labours. It was a hard time for inventors. The law of England then was that patents were invalid if the invention was made known before the patent was applied for, and part of the public insisted on demolishing the invention if it was so made known, so that to avoid the law and the lawless the harassed inventors kept and worked their inventions in secret as long as they could. Hargreaves fled to Nottingham, where works were soon started with his spinning jennys. The ideas of Kay, Wyatt and Hargreaves are said to have been anticipated in Italy. There were makers of cloths at Florence, and also in Spain and the Netherlands, who were far in advance of the English and French in this art, but the descriptions of machinery employed by them are too vague and scanty to sustain the allegation.

And now the long ice age of hand working was breaking up, and the age of machine production was fast setting in. Hargreaves was in the midst of his troubles and his early triumphs, in 1765-1769, when Richard Arkwright entered the field. Arkwright, first a barber, and then a travelling buyer of hair, and finally a knight, learned, as he travelled through Lancashire, Lichfield, Blackburn and Nottingham, of the inventions and labours of Wyatt, Kay and Hargreaves. Possessed as he was of some mechanical skill and inventive genius, and realising that the harvest was ripe and the labourers few, entered the field of inventions, and with the help of Kay, revived the old ideas of John Wyatt and Lewis Paul of spinning by rollers, which had now slumbered for thirty years. Kay and Arkwright constructed a working model, and on this Arkwright by hard pushing and hard work obtained capital, and improved, completed and patented his machine. The machine was first used by him in a mill erected at Nottingham and worked by horses; then at Cromford, and in this mill the power used to drive the spinning machine was a water wheel. His invention was therefore given the name of the water frame, which it retained long after steam had been substituted for water as the driving power. It was also named the throstle, from the fact that it gave a humming or singing sound while at work; but it is commonly known as the drawing frame. Arkwright patented useful improvements. He had to contend with mobs and with the courts, which combined to destroy his machines and his patent, but he finally succeeded in establishing mills, and in earning from the Government, manufacturers, and the public a great and well-merited munificence.

It is a remarkable coincidence that Watt's steam engine patent and Arkwright's first patent for his spinning machine were issued in the same year – 1769. The new era of invention was dawning fast.

Then, in 1776, came Samuel Crompton of Bolton, who invented a combination of the jenny of Hargreaves and the roller water frame of Arkwright, and to distinguish his invention from the others he named it the "mule." The mule was a carriage on wheels to which the spindles were attached. When the mule was drawn out one way on its frame the rovings were drawn from bobbins through rollers on a stationary frame, stretched and twisted into threads, and then as the mule was run back the spun threads were wound on spools on the spindles. The mule entirely superseded the use of the jenny. Notwithstanding the advantage in names the mule did more delicate work than the jenny. It avoided the continuous stretch on the thread of the jenny by first completing the thread and then winding it. Crompton's mule was moved back and forth by hand. Roberts subsequently made it self-acting. Next, followed in England the Rev. Edward Cartwright, who, turning his attention to looms, invented the first loom run by machinery, the first power loom, 1784-85. Then the rioters turned on him, and he experienced the same attentions received by Hargreaves and Arkwright. The ignorance of ages died in this branch of human progress, as it often dies in others, with a violent wrench. But the age of steam had at last come, and with it the spinning machine, the power loom, the printing press, and the discovery among men of the powers of the mind, their freedom to exercise such powers, and their right to possess the fruits of their labours.

The completed inventions of Arkwright and others, combined with Watt's steam engine, revolutionised trade, and resulted in the establishment of mills and factories. A thousand spindles whirled where one hummed before. The factory life which drew the women and girls from their country homes to heated, and closely occupied, ill ventilated buildings within town limits, was, however, not regarded as an improvement in the matter of health; and it was a long time before mills were constructed and operated with the view to the correction of this evil.

The great increase in demand for cotton produced by these machine inventions could not have been met had it not been for Eli Whitney's invention of the saw gin in America in 1793. The cleaning of the seed from the cotton accomplished by this machine produced as great a revolution in the culture of cotton in America as the inventions of Arkwright and others accomplished in spinning and weaving in England. America had also learned of Arkwright's machinery. Samuel Slater, a former employee of Arkwright, introduced it to Rhode Island in 1789, and built a great cotton mill there in 1793. Others followed in Massachusetts. Within twenty years after the introduction of Arkwright's machines in the United States there were a hundred mills there with a hundred thousand spindles.

As has been said, it was customary for weavers to make the warp on their looms at one place, and the spinners to furnish the yarns for the weft from their homes, and even after the spinning machines were invented the spinning and weaving were done at separate places. It remained for Francis C. Lowell of Boston, who had been studying the art of spinning and weaving in England and Scotland and the inventions of Arkwright and Crompton, to establish in 1813 at Waltham, Mass., with the aid of Paul Moody, machinist, the first factory in the world wherein were combined under one roof all the processes for converting cotton into cloth.

The task of the century in this art has been to greatly extend the dominion of machinery in the treatment of cotton and wool in all stages, from the reception of the raw material at the door of the factory to its final completion in the form of the choicest cloth, and to increase the capacity of machines sufficiently to meet an ever-increasing and enormous consumption. There are from twenty to forty separate and distinct operations performed both in spinning and weaving and the completion of a piece of cloth from cotton or wool, and nearly all of these operations are accomplished by machinery.

The century's improvements and inventions in machines for treating and spinning cotton comprise machines for first opening and tearing the matted mass apart as it is taken from the bales, then cleaning, carding, drawing, roving, stretching, spinning, winding, doubling, dressing, warping, weaving, etc. Formerly, the opening machines were simply cylinders armed with spikes, to which the cotton was led through nipping rollers, and then delivered in a loose, fluffy condition. When such a machine was associated with a blowing machine to blow out the dust and cleanse the fibre, the loose and scattered condition in which the cotton was left gave rise to a great danger from fire, and destructive fires often occurred. The object of the later opening machinery is to confine the cotton within a casing in its passage through the machine, during which passage it is thoroughly stretched, beaten and blown and then rolled into a continuous sheet or lap. At the same time, by nice devices, it is evened, that is, freed from all knots, and made of uniform thickness, while a certain quantity only of cotton of known weight is allowed to pass through to constitute the required lap. Finally the lap is wound upon a roller, which when filled is removed to the carder. Although the cotton is now a white, soft, clean, downy sheet, still the fibres cross each other in every direction, and they require to be straightened and laid parallel before the spinning. This is done by carding. Paul, Hargreaves, Robert Peel, and Arkwright had worked in constructing a machine to take the place of hand carding, and it was finally reduced by Arkwright, towards the close of the 18th century, to its present form and principle.

But to make those narrow, ribbon-like, clean, long lines of rolled cotton, known as slivers, by machinery with greater precision and uniformity than is possible by hand, and with a thousand times greater rapidity, has been the work of many inventors at different times and in different countries. The machine cards are cylinders clothed with leather and provided with separate sets of slender, sharp, bent fingers. The different cards are arranged to move past each other in opposite directions, so as to catch and disentangle the fibres. Flat, overhead stationary cards are also used through which the cotton is carried. As one operation of carding is not sufficient for most purposes the cotton is subjected to one or more successive cardings. So ingenious is the structure in some of its parts that as the stream of cotton passes on, any existing knots do not fail to excite the attention of the machine, which at once arrests them and holds them until disentangled. In connection with the cards, combers and strippers are used to assist in further cleaning and straightening the fibre, which is finally removed from the cards and the combs by the doffer. The cotton is stripped from the doffer by the doffer knife and in the form of delicate, flat narrow ribbons, which are drawn through a small funnel to consolidate them, and finally delivered in a coiled form into a tall tin can. The material is then carried to a drawing frame, which takes the spongy slivers, and, carrying them through successive sets of rollers moving at increased speed, elongates, equalises, straightens and "doubles" them, and finally condenses them into two or more rolls by passing the same through a trumpet-shaped funnel. As the yarns still need to be twisted, they are passed through a roving frame similar to a drawing frame. An ingenious device connected with the winding of the roving yarns upon bobbins may be here noted. Formerly the bobbins on which the yarns were wound increased in speed as they were filled, thus endangering and often breaking the thread, and at all times increasing the tension. In 1823 Asa Arnold of Rhode Island invented "a differential motion" by which the velocity of the bobbin is kept uniform. The roving having been reduced to proper size for the intended number of yarns, now goes to the spinning machine, to still further draw out the threads and give to them a more uniform twist and tenuity. The spinning machine is simply an improved form of Crompton's mule, already described.

Great as have been the improvements in many matters in spindle structure, the drawing, the stretching and the twisting still remain fundamentally the same in principle as in the singing throstle of Arkwright and the steady mule of Crompton. And yet so great and rapid has been the advancement of inventions as to details and to meet the great demand, that the machinery of half a century ago has been almost entirely discarded and supplanted by different types. A great improvement on the spinning frame of the 18th century is the ring frame invented by Jenks. In this the spindles, arranged vertically in the frame, are driven by bands from a central cylinder, and project through apertures in a horizontal bar. A flanged ridge around each aperture forms a ring and affords a track for a little steel hoop called a traveller, which is sprung over the ring. The traveller guides the thread on to the spool. As the spindles revolve, the thread passing through the traveller revolves it rapidly, and the horizontal bar rising and falling has the effect of winding the yarn alternately and regularly upon the spools.

The bobbins of the spindle frame were found not large enough to contain a sufficient amount of yarn to permit of a long continuous operation when the warp came to be applied, and besides there were occasional defects in the thread which could not be detected until it broke, if the yarn was used directly from the bobbins. So to save much time and trouble spooling machines were invented which wind the yarn from the bobbins holding 1200 to 1800 yards, to large spools, each holding 18,000 to 20,000 yards; and then by passing the yarn through fine slots in guides which lead to the spool, lumps or weak places, which would break the yarns at the guide, could at once be discovered and the yarn retied firmly, so that there would be no further breaking in the warper. After the yarn is finally spooled it is found that its surface is still rough and covered with fuzz. It is desirable, therefore, that it shall be smoothed out and be given somewhat of a lustre before weaving. These final operations are performed by the warping and dressing machines. In the warping machine the threads are drawn between rollers, the tension of which can be regulated, and then through a "reed," a comb-shaped device which separates the threads, and then finally wound upon a large cylinder. In this machine a device is also arranged which operates to stop the machine at once if any thread is broken. When the cylinder is filled it is then taken to the dresser, which in its modern and useful form is known as the "slusher," by which the yarns are drawn through hot starch, the superfluous starch squeezed out, and the yarns, kept separated all the time, dried by passing them around large drying cylinders, or through a closed box heated by steam pipes, and then wound upon the loom beam or cylinder.

In weaving, as in spinning, however advanced, complicated and improved the means may be beyond the hand methods and simple looms of past ages, the general principles in the process are still the same. These means, generally and broadly speaking, consist of a frame for two sets of threads, a roller, called the warp beam, for receiving and holding the threads which form the warp, a cloth beam upon which the cloth is wound as it is woven, the warp threads, being first laid parallel, carried from the warp beam and attached to the cloth beam; means called heddles, which with their moving frames constitute "a harness," consisting of a set of vertical strings or rods having central loops through which the threads are passed, two or more sets of which receive alternate threads, and by the reciprocation of which the threads are separated into sets, decussated, forming between them what is called a shed through which the shuttle is thrown; means for throwing the shuttle; and means, called the batten, lay or lathe, for forcing or packing the weft tight into the angle formed by the opened warp and so rendering the fabric tight and compact, and then the motive power for turning the cloth beam and winding the cloth as fast as completed. It is along these lines that the inventors have wrought their marvellous changes from hand to power looms.

Prior to 1800, in the weaving of figures into cloths, it was customary to employ boys to pull the cords in the loom harness in order to arrange the coloured threads in their relative positions. In that year appeared at the front Joseph Marie Jacquard, a French mechanician and native of Lyons, whose parents were weavers, a prolific inventor in his youth, a wayward wanderer after fortune and a wife, a soldier in the Revolution, losing a son fighting by his side, eking out a poor living with his wife's help at straw weaving, finally employed by a silk manufacturer, and while thus engaged, producing that loom which has ever since been known by his name. This loom was personally inspected by Napoleon, who rewarded the inventor with honours and a pension. It was then demolished by a mob and its inventor reviled, but it afterward became the pride of Lyons and the means of its renown and wealth in the weaving of silks of rich designs.

The leading feature of the Jacquard loom consists of a chain of perforated pattern cards made to pass over a drum, through which cards certain needles pass, causing certain threads of the warp to rise and fall, according to the holes in the cards, and thus admitting at certain places in the warp coloured weft threads thrown by the shuttle, and reproducing the pattern which is perforated in the cards. The Jacquard device could be applied to any loom, and it worked a revolution in the manufacture of figured goods. The complexity and expensiveness of Jacquard's loom were greatly reduced by subsequent improvements. In 1854 M. Bonelli constructed an electric loom in which the cards of the Jacquard apparatus are superseded by an endless band of tin-foiled paper, which serves as an electrical conductor to operate the warp thread needles, which before had each been actuated by a spiral spring. The Jacquard loom was also greatly improved by the English inventors, Barlow, Taylor, Martain and others.

Radcliffe and Johnson, also of England, had invented and introduced the machines for dressing the yarns in one operation before the weaving; Horrocks and Marsland of Stockport greatly improved the adaptation of steam to the driving of looms, and Roberts of Manchester made striking advances in their mechanical parts and in bringing them to their present state of wonderful efficiency.

In America, in 1836, George Crompton of Taunton, Massachusetts, commenced a series of inventions in power looms for the manufacture of fancy woollen goods, and in the details of such looms generally, particularly in increasing the speed of the shuttle, which vastly increased the production of such goods and gave to his looms a world-wide reputation.

E. B. Bigelow of Massachusetts in 1848 invented a power loom, which was exhibited at the Exhibition at London in 1851, and astonished the world by his exhibition of carpets superior to any woven by hand. By the later improvements, and the aid of steam power, a single American Bigelow carpet loom can turn out now one hundred yards of Brussels carpet in a day, far superior in quality to any carpet which could possibly be made by hand, when a man toiled painfully to produce five yards a day. Mr. Bigelow was also a pioneer inventor of power machines for weaving coach lace, and cotton checks and ginghams. James Lyall of New York invented a power loom applicable either to the weaving of very wide and heavy fabrics, such as jute canvas for the foundation of floor oil cloth, or to fabrics made of the finest and most delicate yarns.