Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/326

312 invention in 1800, and its use has gradually become general in figured goods. It is regarded as the greatest invention in the art of weaving, next to the power-loom itself, and was only eclipsed by that of our own inventor, Erastus B. Bigelow, who made the Jacquard loom automatic. A report of the patent commissioner has declared that "Mr. Bigelow's invention presents a machine which is admitted to be unsurpassed by anything which the mechanical genius of man has ever devised." Mr. Bigelow's invention was patented in 1838, but not perfected for Brussels carpets until ten years later. It revolutionized that industry at once. The cost of weaving Brussels carpets had hitherto been about thirty cents a yard, and the product of the hand-loom did not exceed four yards a day. The Bigelow invention made it easy for a single female weaver to weave from twenty-five to thirty yards of carpet a day, at a cost for labor of about four cents a yard. With the expiration of Mr. Bigelow's patents a most extraordinary impetus was at once given to the carpet manufacture in the United States, where to-day more carpets are made and used than in any other country.

The power-loom, as to-day constructed and used, is unquestionably one of the most perfect, as it is one of the most complicated, of human inventions. The range of textiles, hitherto made only on hand-looms, is becoming, on account of the constant development of the power-loom, more limited every year. It is only in the production of fabrics in the weaving of which continual and elaborate changes have to be made in the colored weft threads that the hand-loom is still used—excluding, of course, its permanent use as a pattern-loom.

The development of the loom has been accompanied by many inventions which simplify and expedite loom-mounting, which includes all the processes through which the warp yarns must pass between the spinning-frame and the loom. Filling is wound directly into a cop for the shuttle, and placed therein, ready for the weaving. The processes to which war]) yarns are subject are known as warping, sizing, beaming, healding, and sleying. They determine the character and variation of the weave; and, in a sense, the art of cloth manufacture, as distinguished from its mechanics, may be said to center in them, and in the designing-room, from which they are controlled. We have left ourselves no space in which to even allude to the various interesting and ingenious machines now utilized in the preparation of the warp for the loom. Necessarily this is the point in the manufacture of fancy goods where automatic machinery can not be wholly applied. In connection with the action of the harnesses in the loom, all the variations of the weave are determined by the designer, whose plans for the distribution and shedding of the threads must be carried out by hand.