Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/205

Rh slubbers frequently maltreated the children they employed. It was not until 1826, as we have seen, that the invention of Goulding, by making automatic roving possible, dispensed with the labor of children in this branch. Goulding's invention was as large a gain to humanity as to the manufacture.

Until recent years, the raw material was fed upon the cards by hand. Before the invention of feed rolls and endless apron, the wool was held in the hand against the revolving surface of the card-roller until it was seized by its teeth. Then a "feed-sheet" of cotton cloth was invented; then the lattice-apron. By both these devices the wool was taken from the feed-roll directly by the main cylinder of the card. Then came the "tumbler," interposed between the feed-rolls and the cylinder; then the wooden "licker-in" was added, and years later the metallic burr-roller, invented by Francis Alton Calvert. In 1864 a Belgian inventor, Jean Sebastian Bolette, invented a machine which measured the wool as it fed the card, and regulated the supply automatically. Still another machine, the work of an American inventor, William Calvert Bramwell, mixes as well as weighs the wool, throws out much of the remaining refuse, and permits a carding machine to turn out from twenty-five to forty per cent more work than was possible by hand-feeding. These automatic feeders, and additional series of equally ingenious machines for transferring the wool from one card to the other, and the improvement of the card itself, have enormously increased its productive capacity. Fifty pounds of clean wool a day was a very fair average for the carding engine of twenty-five years ago. This average has now increased to one hundred and one hundred and fifty pounds a day, according to the width of the carding machine and its cylinders, and the quality and character of the materials employed.

It is astonishing to watch these monster engines, grim as implements of war and death, absorb the tangled wool in their greedy jaws, draw it tenderly upon their bewildering mass of rapidly revolving wheels, cylinders, and rollers armed with sharp teeth, shake from it any remaining dirt or foreign substance, whirl it rapidly round and round and in and out, and finally deliver it in the form of a dainty, white film, which another attachment gathers automatically into balls or rolls, ready for the preliminary processes of spinning.

Modern carding accomplishes four things essential to successful manufacture: the thorough blending of the component fibers; their rearrangement in a form somewhat parallel; their final cleansing of all refuse matter; and their union and condensation into a continuous thread called the sliver. To accomplish these ends with the utmost speed, with a minimum of waste, without injury to the delicate fiber, is the function of the modern carding