Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/310

296 most complicated and beautiful processes in the whole manufacture, performed upon a machine which the operatives in some parts of Europe call "the iron man," in allusion to its deft action.

The mule is the machine now universally used in the manufacture of woolen yarn. But an entirely different method of



spinning is also applied in the woolen manufacture, or in that branch of it known as the worsted manufacture, quite distinct in several of its preliminary details, and quite as important in the modern development of the industry.

These two distinct processes of manufacture which have grown up in the treatment of wool, have practically made two industries out of one. They are alike, in that they utilize the same raw material, and do not essentially differ until the process of carding is completed. This diversion of the industry is traced to the immigration of the Flemings, which occurred during the reign of Henry I, although historians have attempted to antedate the worsted manufacture even to the Saxon period. The worsted manufacture originated at Worsted, a town in Norfolk, where one of the early Flemish colonies existed whose people employed a method of their own in treating the wool, which produced a woolen stuff of a peculiar quality, to which the name of worsted was given. There is no earlier record of its existence than the time of Edward II (1315), when a complaint was made to Parliament that the clothiers of Norwich who manufactured worsted