Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/312

298 quality and to secure elongation and parallel arrangement of the fibers."

In the early days of the manufacture the best results were only attainable in worsted yarns from long-fibered fleece. The English wools are commonly called combing-wools for this reason, and it was the possession of this fleece of an unrivaled quality which made England the birthplace of the worsted manufacture, and has kept it at the front in this process.

One of the results of improved machinery has been to remove any distinction between woolens and worsteds based upon the difference between the wools employed in the two processes. Short wool of merino blood can now be combed as successfully as the longer staple. The processes of treatment, however, continue to differ radically. This difference, as already seen, is primarily created by the introduction of the combing machine, an instrument unknown to the wool manufacture proper.

Short-stapled wool is carded before going to the comb; but the long wools, to avoid the breaking of the fibers which would result from carding, are prepared for combing by screw gill-boxes, so constructed as to open, separate, and straighten the fibers. Five or six slivers obtained from the first gill-box may be run into one by the use of a second gilling machine, so intermingling them that the deficiencies of one sliver are supplied by its neighbor. The half-dozen slivers are thus drawn into one smaller than any of those of which it is composed. This operation is continued through other gill-boxes when fine counts of yarn are desired, until the fibers have become thoroughly separated and parallel, to facilitate the work of the combing machine.

This machine is the mechanical wonder of the wool industry. It performs with automatic precision a series of complicated movements long deemed to be only capable of accomplishment by hands guided by human intelligence. For years after the idea of the machine took germ, it was the hope and the despair of many inventors in England and on the Continent. The hand-worker remained in exclusive control of the delicate operation until 1830.