TEXTILE MACHINERY.
Among the utilitarian arts which mark man's progress from a state of barbarism, there are none of greater antiquity than that of spinning and weaving. It appears, indeed, to have come into existence with the first dawniugs of civilization. In the remains of the Lake-dwellers there have been found shuttles and plaited stuff made of flax (p1. 34, 3), which took the place of woven goods. The Mound-builders of the Ohio Valley manufactured from sonic vegetable fibre a coarse cloth woven with a warp and filling whose threads were uniform in size and regularly spun. The ancient Egyptians prepared "vestments of fine linen" (Gen. xli. 42), as also of cotton, and in their production, as their native monuments show (fig. 2), men and women were alike employed. In Exodus (xxxv. 30) there is mention "of the weaver," and Isaiah (xix. 9) in his prophecy concerning the Egyptians says, "They that work in combed flax and they that weave cotton shall be ashamed." The staff of Goliath's spear was like "a weaver's beam " (I Sam. xxii. 7), and Job (vii. 6) says, " My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle." " Penelope's web" (fig. t) was woven by a Grecian princess; the Latin filth (daughter) signifies "the spinner," and the German IVcib (wife), " the weaver." In the Middle Ages these handicrafts were ennobled in the eyes of all the people, and a golden spindle was placed upon the grave of Luitgard, the daughter of Otto the Great, as a testimony of her diligence.
Everywhere for long centuries practically the same methods and appliances were employed in working textile fibres; the distaff, the spindle, with or without the wheel, and time hand-loom were busy the world over. The poet's idealistic description of one of the phases of ]tonne-life in Acadie might, with variations to suit different conditions and customs, have been appropriately applied to every community : " Matrons and maidens sat in snow-white caps and in kirtles Scarlet and blue and green, with distaffs spinning the golden Flax for the gossiping looms, whose noisy shuttles within doors Mingled their sound with the whir of the wheels and the songs of the maidens." These slow and laborious processes continued until near the close of the eighteenth century. Previous to that time the materials employed in the manufacture of textile fabrics were mainly linen and wool, neither of which admitted, upon the wheel (fig. 5) and the hand-loom (fig. 8),
of any great complexity of structure. Between the years 1767 and 'Soo three inventions—namely, the spinning-frame, the cotton-gin, and the Jacquard machine—brought into being an extended list of fabrics infinite in variety of pattern and texture.
7hc Spinning-jemy (fig. 9), invented by Hargreaves in 1767, was capable of spinning front twenty to thirty threads at once with no more labor than had previously been required to spin a single thread. But the thread spun by the jenny did not possess the firmness required for the warp; this latter was made of linen until Arkwright, in 1768, produced the cotton-spinning frame (p1. 34, fig. ii), by which there could be spun a vast number of threads of any required firmness and hardness, and with such rapidity that the work of one man sufficed to produce what before had required the labor of more than one hundred. Crompton's " mule jenny " (fig. io), invented in 1775, is a combination of Hargreaves's jenny and of Arkwright's spinning-frame.
The invention of the spinning-frame greatly increased the demand for the supply of the cotton fibre, but this demand could never have been met had there not been invented a machine for expe ditiously separating the fibre from the seeds, which, contained in every boll of cotton, cling to the fibre with such tenacity that the process of separat ing them by hand is very slow and tedious, a pound of green seed-cotton being all that one person can clean in a day. Though a rude machine called the " churka " had long been in use by the Chinese and the Hindus, and a similar one called the "manganello" had been employed by the Italians, no satisfactory results were attained until the invention of the cotton-gin by Eli Whitney in 1793. This machine (y51. 35, fig. 2) had a wonderful effect on the cultivation and manufacture of cotton, and rapidly increased its production and consumption. Though not suited to the long-stapled Sea-Island cotton, the ordinary Whitney gin is employed for cleaning the greater portion of the cotton grown in the Southern States. Its average daily capacity is about thirty-two hundred pounds.