I may here remark, that various machines have been constructed of late years for making continuous card-ends, and slubbings, in imitation of the carding and roving of the [Cotton Manufacture]; to which article I therefore refer my readers. The wool slubbings are now spun into yarn, in many factories, by means of the mule. Indeed, I have seen in France the finest yarn, for the mousseline-de-laine fabrics, beautifully spun upon the self-actor mule of Sharp and Roberts.[72]
[72] See this admirable machine fully described and delineated in my Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain, vol. ii.
Tentering.—When the cloth is returned from the [fulling-mill] (which see), it is stretched upon the tenter-frame, and left in the open air till dry.
In the woollen manufacture, as the cloth suffers, by the operation of the fulling-mill, a shrinkage of its breadth to well nigh one-half, it must at first be woven of nearly double its intended width when finished. Superfine six-quarter broad cloths must therefore be turned out of the loom twelve-quarters wide.
Burling is the name of a process, in which the dried cloth is examined minutely in every part, freed from knots or uneven threads, and repaired by sewing any little rents, or inserting sound yarns in the place of defective ones.
Teasling.—The object of this operation is to raise up the loose filaments of the woollen yarn into a nap upon one of the surfaces of the cloth, by scratching it either with thistle-heads, called teasels, or with teasling-cards or brushes, made of wire. The natural teasels are the balls which contain the seeds of the plant called Dipsacus fullorum; the scales which form the balls, project on all sides, and end in sharp elastic points, that turn downwards like hooks. In teasling by hand, a number of these balls are put into a small wooden frame, having crossed handles, eight or ten inches long; and when thus filled, form an implement not unlike a curry-comb, which is used by two men, who seize the teasel-frame by the handles, and scrub the face of the cloth, hung in a vertical position from two horizontal rails, made fast to the ceiling of the workshop. First, they wet the cloth, and work three times over, by strokes in the direction of the warp, and next of that of the weft, so as to raise all the loose fibres from the felt, and to prepare it for shearing. In large manufactories, this dressing operation is performed by a machine called a gig-mill, which originally consisted, and in most places still consists, of a cylinder bristled all over with the thistle-heads, and made to revolve rapidly while the cloth is drawn over it in a variety of directions. If the thistle be drawn in the line of the warp, the points act more efficaciously upon the weft, being perpendicular to its softer spun yarns. Inventors who have tried to give the points a circular or oblique action between the warp and the weft, proceed apparently upon a false principle, as if the cloth were like a plate of metal, whose substance could be pushed in any direction. Teasling really consists in drawing out one end of the filaments, and leaving the body of them entangled in the cloth; and it should seize and pull them perpendicularly to their length, because in this way it acts upon the ends, which being least implicated, may be most readily disengaged.
When the hooks of the thistles become clogged with flocks of wool, they must be taken out of the frame or cylinder, and cleaned by children with a small comb. Moisture, moreover, softens their points, and impairs their teasling powers; an effect which needs to be counterbalanced, by taking them out, and drying them from time to time. Many contrivances have, therefore, been proposed, in which metallic teasels of an unchangeable nature, mounted in rotatory machines, driven by power, have been substituted for the vegetable, which being required in prodigious quantities, become sometimes excessively scarce and dear in the clothing districts. In 1818, several schemes of that kind were patented in France, of which those of M. Arnold-Merick, and of MM. Taurin frères, of Elbœuf, are described in the 16th volume of Brevets d’Invention expirés. Mr. Daniell, cloth manufacturer in Wilts, renewed this invention under another form, by making his rotatory cards with two kinds of metallic wires, of unequal lengths; the one set, long, thin, and delicate, representing the points of the thistle; the other, shorter, stiffer, and blunter, being intended to stay the cloth, and to hinder the former from entering too far into it. But none of these processes have succeeded in discarding the natural teasel from the most eminent manufactories.
The French government purchased, in 1807, the patent of Douglas, an English mechanist, who had, in 1802, imported into France, the best system of gig-mills then used in the west of England. A working set of his machines having been placed in the Conservatoire des Arts, for public inspection, they were soon introduced into most of the French establishments, so as generally to supersede teasling (lainage) by hand. A description of them was published in the third volume of the Brevets d’Invention. The following is an outline of some subsequent improvements:—
1. As it was imagined that the seesaw action of the hand operative was in some respects more effectual than the uniform rotation of a gig-mill, this was attempted to be imitated by an alternating movement.