Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/475

Rh Dr. Grothe, the distinguished German investigator of textile evolution, has testified that the contributions of American inventors to finishing machinery exceed in extent and value those of any other nation; and he adds that, as a result of his investigations, he is "happy to award the merit of priority in invention, frequently claimed for England, to America, the country which has created inventors through her system of home industry and personal liberty."

We have now completed our tour of the woolen-mill and our hasty examination of the machines which have superseded the earlier inventions in these establishments. Not less striking than their wonderful ingenuity is their multiplicity. We find not only a separate machine for each of the twenty-three different operations enumerated by Ure in 1834, but we also find, in the larger mills, great numbers of these separate machines. A modern factory is, therefore, something almost entirely different from anything which existed a century ago. It contains vast rooms, each devoted to separate branches of the industry. In one we find the scouring machines; in another, the carding machines; in another, if it be a worsted-mill, the combs and gilling machines; in another, long rows of whirling spindles tire the eye, and in another the clatter of hundreds of looms suggests pandemonium. Everything is systematized, and the surroundings of the operatives, with abundance of light, with perfect ventilation, with steam-heat, with convenient retiring-rooms, justify the statement that the gain of the manufacture through improved machinery is no greater than the gain of the operative, which has come through the accompanying improvement in the construction and arrangement of the buildings in which these operations are conducted.

The development of the wool manufacture in the United States occupies a unique relation in this narrative. It is contemporaneous with the period of the actual mechanical florescence of the industry. Up to the time when our independence was asserted, we were a nation dependent upon our household industries and our foreign commerce. We used but little cotton—that little, strange as it now seems, being imported. Men and women were clad in homespun, spun and woven on the domestic wheel and loom. Almost every man was literally his own weaver. The earliest records show that the subject of their clothing was an object of solicitude to the primitive law-makers of the colonies. They were without any raw material whatever. They found no important fiber indigenous here, and their solicitude was great to domesticate sheep.

The first approach to a woolen-mill in the colonies of which