Makers of Many Things

by Eva March Tappan

The silkworm may have seemed greedy, but he did not eat one leaf too much for the task that lies before him. There is nothing lazy about him; and now he works with all his might, making his cocoon. He begins at the outside and shapes it like a particularly plump peanut of a clear, pale yellow. The silk is stiffened with a sort of gum as it comes out of the spinneret. The busy little worm works away, laying its threads in place in the form of a figure eight. For some time the cocoon is so thin that one can watch him. It is calculated that his tiny head makes sixty-nine movements every minute.

The covering grows thicker and the room for the silkworm grows smaller. After about seventy-two hours, put your ear to the cocoon, and if all is quiet within, it is completed and the worm is shut up within it. Strange things happen to him while he sleeps in the quiet of his silken bed, for he becomes a dry brown chrysalis without head or feet. Then other things even more marvelous come to pass, for in about three weeks the little creature pushes the threads apart at one end of the cocoon and comes out, not a silkworm at all, but a moth with head and wings and legs and eyes. This moth lays hundreds of eggs, and in less than three weeks it dies.

This is what the silkworm will do if it is left alone; but it is the business of the silk-raiser to see that it is not left alone. About eight days after the cocoon is begun, it is steamed or baked to kill the chrysalis so that it cannot make its way out and so spoil the silk. The quarter of an ounce of eggs will make about thirty pounds of cocoons. Now is the time to be specially watchful, for there is nothing in which rats and mice so delight as a plump, sweet chrysalis; and they care nothing whatever for the three or four thousand yards of silk that is wound about each one.

To take this silk off is a delicate piece of work. A single fiber is not much larger than the thread of a cobweb, and before the silk can be used, several threads must be united in one. First, the cocoon is soaked in warm water to loosen the gum that the worm used to stick its threads together. Ends of silk from half a dozen or more cocoons are brought together, run through a little hole in a guide, and wound on a reel as one thread. This needs skill and practice, for the reeled silk must be kept of the same size. The cocoon thread is so slender that, of course, it breaks very easily; and when this happens, another thread must be pieced on. Then, too, the inner silk of the cocoon is finer than the outer; so unless care is taken to add threads, the reeled silk will be irregular. The water must also be kept just warm enough to soften the gum, but not too hot.

The silk is taken off the reel, and the skeins are packed up in bales as if it were of no more value than

[97]

cotton. Indeed, it does not look nearly so pretty and attractive as a lap of pure white cotton, for it is stiff and gummy and has hardly any luster. Now it is sent to the manufacturer. It is soaked in hot soapy water for several hours, and it is drawn between plates so close together that, while they allow the silk to go through, they will not permit the least bit of roughness or dirt to pass. If the thread breaks, a tiny "faller," such as are used in cotton mills, falls down and stops the machine. The silk must now be twisted, subjected to two or three processes to increase its luster, and dyed,—and if you would like to feel as if you were paying a visit to a rainbow, go into a mill and watch the looms with their smooth, brilliant silks of all the colors that can be imagined. After the silk is woven, it is polished on lustering machines, singed to destroy all bits of free fibers or lint, freed of all threads that may project, and scoured if it is of a light color; then sold.

[Click here to see a larger version of this photo.]