Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/486

470 this evolution, the combination of which includes the sum of the advance. Not less wonderful than the succession of power-machines for the automatic handling of the fiber in the several stages of its manipulation, is the series of mechanical contrivances for the automatic delivery of the material from machine to machine without the touching of human hand. The ingenuity of man has been constantly directed, in these latter years, to devices for the accomplishment of two purposes: first, to increase production; second, to diminish waste. Both tend to reduce the cost to the consumer, the first by reducing the number of operatives required to make a given amount of product and by increasing the productive capacity of machines otherwise perfect. Perfect as these machines now appear to be in their operation, every one among them is susceptible of improvement, and the patent offices of every manufacturing nation are burdened with the plans and specifications of new devices, conceived by the bright mechanics who abound among the operatives, and suggested generally by their daily work and observation, the purpose of which is to add either simplicity or celerity, or to still further reduce the necessity for handling. Most of these inventions come to naught; many of them are constantly introduced into the mills. Some few of these advances not previously spoken of may be enumerated here. Self-feeders on the first breaker and finisher have been applied to card machines, dispensing with half the help formerly necessary in the card-room. Self-operating mules have been introduced in cloth-mills, effecting a saving of from twenty to forty per cent in the cost of spinning. Improved winders, driers, and cloth-presses give greatly increased rapidity to the processes of finishing. In weaving flannels, a width of three yards at once, seventy-five or eighty picks a minute are woven as economically and as excellently as forty or fifty picks were thirty years ago. In making cassimeres, the broad loom has been generally substituted for the narrow loom almost universally employed as recently as 1860. Fifty-six yards of Brussels carpet can now be woven in a day by one girl, in the improved looms, where fourteen yards a day was a good product in 1860, with the same help. Similar illustrations might be multiplied almost indefinitely. While there has been no new departure or novel idea of transforming effect in the wool manufacture, the general advance in mechanical efficiency, during the last quarter-century, has been so great as to equal an economical gain in manufacture equivalent to that which took place when power was first substituted for hand-labor. In our great