Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/204

192 industry during the present century was the invention of John Goulding, of Worcester, Mass., and was patented in 1826. Before his invention the length of the rolls issuing from the carding machine was limited to the breadth of the card. The ends of the separate rolls had to be spliced together by hand, a tedious and expensive process, with the aid of a machine known as the billy. Goulding dispensed with the billy altogether, and accomplished with four machines what had previously required the use of five. The invention enabled manufacturers to produce yarn from wool at much less cost, of better quality, and in greater quantity than was produced by the old process. His machine also dispensed with short rolls and introduced the long or endless roll. Goulding's invention thus combined in the carding process operations which up to its introduction required an intermediate process before spinning to prepare the roving for the jack. The purpose of this superseded machine, called the billy or slubbing machine, was to join the detached rovings in a continuous spongy cord, to which it also imparted a slight twist and some draft. This operation had been performed in the days of hand manufacture on a spinning-wheel somewhat similar to the common spinning-wheel but smaller in size. The slubbing billy was introduced soon after Hargreaves's invention of the spinning jenny had been applied to the woolen manufacture, and closely resembled this machine in its working parts.

The cardings, as they fell from the card machine, were taken up by children, called pieceners, whose work it was to join these porous rolls by rolling their ends together with the palms of the hand, and then lay them upon the billy board, whence they were drawn upon the spindles by the movement of a carriage and wound into a conical cop. The billy usually contained from fifty to one hundred spindles, and its wheel was turned by the slubber, who must also draw the carriage. One slubber and one billy were appointed to each carding machine, and generally four pieceners. It was in this branch of the work that complaints of cruelty to children were so frequent during the earlier half of the century. It was well established in parliamentary investigations that the