Aside from minor details perfecting the mechanical construction, such has been the evolution of the modern spinning frame. In 1830, it required the constant attention of one spinner to oversee twenty slow-running spindles, whereas, in 1896, the same attendant could, with less effort, “tend” seventy-five or more of the high speed type; and whereas, in 1790, when the first American cotton mill was established by Samuel Slater in Rhode Island, there were only seventy-five spindles on cotton fibre, in 1830, the number had increased to 1,246,703, and in 1890, to 14,188,103.
Under such competition no wonder the spinning-wheel of our grandmothers has followed the economic law, that the fittest alone survive, and has been relegated to the wood-pile or garret, or, bedecked with ribbons, finds a resting-place in the chimney-corner as a decorated curiosity. Its mighty rival is here. Its attendants have been liberated to more ennobling pursuits. The homespun has been replaced by beautiful fabrics, and the monster spinning frames of to-day pour forth their hourly product in miles of spun fibre, where the wheels of our grandmothers were taxed to the utmost to produce a very small fraction of the amount. To appreciate the wonderful change, pause beside the domestic wheel used within the memory of the living, and compare its “whirr,” in slowly producing its single thread, to the “buzz” of the modern spinning frame turning out its product from a thousand spindles.
HAND COMB OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
The production of yarn required something more than spinning. The fibres in the massed cotton or wool, as delivered to the manufacturer, must be opened, untangled, straightened out, and laid parallel by a series of preparing machines prior to being spun, among which the carding engine ranks first. In the incipient form, this machine dates as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century, when, by hand manipulation, two cylinders covered with small teeth and working in close proximity disintegrated the fibrous mass; but the fibres were much broken and not evenly arranged. The addition of the workers and strippers around a rapidly revolving swift gave increased utility to the machine, and Bramwell’s feed, in 1871, so regulated the amount of fibre fed at intervals that the resulting lap possessed the desired even character. This feed weighs the fibre as it is fed, stops the lifting apron while the scale pan dumps its load, resets the scale pan, and automatically starts the lifting apron to again feed the scale,—a cycle of operations indicating a near approach to human intelligence.
One additional machine at least, the comb, requires notice before passing to the all-important progress made in the loom structure. With advancing civilization and refinement came demands for superior fabrics, which could only be answered by a supply of better fibre. Such fibre could only be secured from the bale by separating the long from the short, a problem well calculated to tax the ingenuity of an enlightened age. Attempts had been made to do this by hand implements not unlike the curry-comb of to-day, except that the teeth were long and tapering. This remained the only means employed for years, while other textile machinery passed through its phenomenal period of development. At last, in 1841, it occurred to Heilman, while watching a lady comb her hair, that a machine might be constructed to comb wool by drawing a bunch of fibres over pins. He constructed a device on this principle, and in a developed form it is used still and known as the Heilman or nip comb.
NOBLE COMB OF 1890.
In 1853, James Noble gave to the world the circle comb, wherein two flat circular rings, having projecting from one face vertical pins, were mounted, one eccentrically within the other, and revolved in the same direction, the object being to dab the fibre on the rings where they met; and then as they revolved and separated the short fibre would be drawn off the large ring, leaving the long fibre freed from the short. These machines were successful, and above all they were practical—the operation of the hand comber disappeared from the face of the earth.
The sudden birth and rapid development of mechanically perfect means for preparing and spinning fibres were due largely to the comparatively simple movements required to draw and twist the yarn, but in the loom no such problem was presented. Here the movements were complicated and varied, and the application of power to the manipulation of the delicate threads was not susceptible of sudden and successful solution. The warps, stretched in a sheet between two beams, had to be opened to form the shed, the shuttle had to be passed therethrough, the weft beaten to place, and means provided to feed the warp and to take up of the fabric an amount at each beat-up corresponding to the size of the weft. These were the movements necessary in the most simple kind of weaving, and though fully understood for many centuries, as evidenced by the Indian and Egyptian looms, and as embodied in hand machines of the seventeenth century, it was not till 1787 that they were clothed with the application of power. Even then the first embodiment did not emanate from the hands of a weaver or engineer, but from Dr. Cartwright, a clergyman in the church of England. It was not surprising that these looms failed of their expectations, for the shuttle would frequently get trapped in the shed, the driven power-lay would break out the warp threads, the take-up and let-off motions were not graduated to compensate for the decrease of the warp and increase of the cloth beams, resulting in thin and thick places in the cloth. But this application of power to the loom was the initial step in the industrial supremacy of the machine, which to-day works with the perfect cadence of an automaton.