Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/496

482 for market and transportation to the factory, where it is to be made into cloth.

This demands the use not only of the cart or wagon, an old but important invention, but the railroad, the car, and the locomotive or the steamship, or perhaps both of them. It is bewildering to think of the inventions involved in these, and I could not even enumerate them in the time I have, if I knew them all.

When the cotton reaches the factory, an invention stands ready to unload it from the cars and deposit it where it is to be used. The iron bands are removed by some instrument invented for the purpose, and the cotton is released from its confinement. It is submitted to machinery to free it from dirt and restore it to something of its original light, flocculent character, and it then enters a machine which spreads it out into a long sheet like cotton batting. This sheet in turn is stretched out into a long, soft rope, called a roving. Successive machines, four or five in number, I believe, extend the roving and make it smaller, till it is smaller than a common pencil. It then goes on to a spinning-frame and is twisted into a thread ready for weaving. Our two cents' worth of cotton has been drawn out into a fine thread more than 7,000 yards long, each inch of which has more than forty twists in it.

Shall I stop to tell you what man has achieved in the art of spinning? The art, as you know, is a very old one. Its invention lies back of the records of history. It was practiced a long time in its primitive form as a mere manual operation. The wool or flax or cotton was carried on a distaff. The thread was drawn out and twisted by means of a spindle held in the left hand, by which it was set to whirling while the fibers were drawn out of the mass and guided by the fingers of the right hand. The art was practiced in this crude way for ages, and it is so practiced now in some countries.

A book which describes this process says it was an obvious improvement to set the spindle in a frame and set it whirling by a band passed round it, and around a large wheel which was in revolution. But it was not so obvious that anybody, through long years, thought of it till about three hundred and fifty years ago. I believe this improvement which constituted the common spinning-wheel was invented in Germany. A woman could spin with it much faster than in the old way, but she only kept one spindle employed. A little more than a hundred years ago the spinning-frame was invented in England, in which a number of spindles were set and kept in operation at the same time. At first only eight spindles were used, but now several hundred are used in one frame.

There were three leading inventors at this early date who each made important improvements in spinning—Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Crompton. With a common wheel a woman can draw out a thread about four miles long in a day. On a modern spinning-frame