Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/206

194 machines. In a general way the process is that of carding cotton, but the resemblance is only general. Between the carding machinery and the loom, in the wool manufacture proper, there is now but one machine, the mule or frame; but in the manipulation of cotton there are several machines between card and loom, and the doublings amount to thousands. Thus the carding process in the woolen manufacture is the most important of all in one sense, instead of the spinning, as in cotton manufacture.

There are two systems of carding now in common use. That most generally adopted in the woolen manufacture in England consists of a scribbler, containing two swifts, an intermediate, also with two swifts, and a carder, containing two swifts and a condenser. The system universally in vogue in this country in the woolen manufacture has the same set of three machines (called here the first breaker, the second breaker, and the finisher), but each engine having but one swift or large cylinder, as in the illustration here given. Both systems produce satisfactory results. Each of these three machines is nearly similar, and each advances the material from the other. The main organ of a card is the cylinder, generally about four feet in diameter, and covered with card clothing, not different in principle from the primitive clothing above described. Around this cylinder revolve several smaller cylinders, similarly clothed, called workers, which continually remove the wool from the main cylinder, separating the fibers and combing them. From the workers, as they become saturated with wool, it is removed by another roll with longer teeth, called the "fancy," which revolves at a higher speed. The carded wool is then removed by the "doffer," and passes on to the second and third machine, to undergo the same process twice more, each time by finer card clothing, until it is finally removed by a pair of small rollers called condensers. These condensers, one above the other, have strips of card clothing affixed, which alternate. Thus the wool is taken off in long strips, which pass through more condensing rollers which are given a transverse rectilinear motion, the combination of these two giving a soft and twisted thread of woolen yarn or sliver.

Some conception of the amount of dislocation and blending of fibers to which these carding engines subject the wool is possible from the fact that there are upward of fifty-six million teeth or points in an ordinary English card, fifty millions of which come in contact with the wool, separating and carrying it forward, six millions playing the part of extractors, drawing the fibers from the teeth of the other rollers. Prof. Beaumont estimates that, in an ordinary scribbling engine, the wool is continually subjected to the disturbing and intermixing action of twenty-five thousand points. Remembering that this operation is three times