Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/474

458, with but slight modifications, down even to the present century. It was slow, laborious, and extremely painful to the workmen who were compelled to operate the shears. The principle of the machine now used for shearing cloth is a cylinder armed with a knife arranged in a helix—a sharp screw turning tangentially in contact with a fixed knife and the cloth upon which the latter rests. Eleazar Hovey, of Canaan, Conn., patented a shearing machine in 1811; and this invention was introduced into France in 1812 by George Bass, of Boston, Mass., and there and everywhere is ranked among the most important of the inventions which have brought the woolen manufacture to its present high state.

Following the shearing, which fine cloths, like broadcloth, undergo twice and three times, are boiling and crabbing. Cloth that is to be "dyed in the piece" now takes its turn in the dye-house, and is run through the dye-kettles in an endless belt over cylinders, as in fulling. Crabbing is a process of scouring by steam, applied separately to each side of the cloth by rolling it upon large metal cylinders, and then rewinding the cloth, reversed, to give it the surface preparatory to dyeing. The process of inspection, called "perching," intervenes at one point or another, according to the fabric, by which any defects in the manufacture are noted. Knotters and binders remedy these defects, removing knots left by the loom, and mending broken threads. Finally comes the pressing, by which the final finish and luster are given to fine cloths. Until quite recently pressing was done by folding the cloth in layers between boards of smooth pasteboard and pressing them between hot plates in hydraulic presses. A machine now expedites this process by compressing the cloth between rollers heated by steam. The inventor of the pressing machine with steam was Seth Hart, who received a United States patent in 1812. This invention appears twelve years later in Europe, John Jones taking out an English patent for the same machine in 1824. It appears that John Beverley, an owner of woolen and cotton factories in the United States, made the first use of the hydraulic press in 1803. He named it a "hydromechanical press." Bowker and Hall, of Boston, constructed a rotating cylinder press, heated by steam, in 1814, which is believed to have contained the first idea of the steam cylinder cloth-press now so universally used. The finishing operations to which worsteds are subjected differ slightly from those applied to woolens, with less of fulling and sometimes with none. Singeing machines are often utilized here, in which the fabric is passed over copper plates, heated to a white heat, so quickly and deftly as to burn from it only the excrescences, leaving the tissue itself unscorched and perfect. Thus completed, the goods are finally boxed and ready for the market.