Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume X.djvu/511

 LINEN 505 important place in the general trade in this fabric. The first mills in England for spinning flax were erected in Darlington near the close of the last century, upon plans the invention of which is claimed by the French, though afterward, as they admit, greatly perfected by the English. Other mills were soon estab- lished, and the British manufacture at last be- came more extensive than that of other na- tions. It attained the greatest prosperity in Ireland, where the manufacture is more gen- erally carried on than in any other country, owing, as it is asserted, to its climate being best adapted for successful bleaching of linen, a process much more difficult and tedious than that of bleaching cotton, conducted very much in the open air, and dependent in great mea- sure upon the condition of the atmosphere. The machine processes of weaving and spin- ning are not very different from those for cot- ton already described. To make the slivers into yarn for thread, the tin cans containing them are brought to a drawing or spreading frame, and several slivers are united into one and drawn out, a process which may be sever- al times repeated, as in the preparation of the cotton yarns. The drawings are then slightly twisted upon a roving frame, and wound upon bobbins to be ready for spinning. For the finer fabrics it is found necessary to increase the pliability of the fibres by keeping them moist. This is effected by means of a trough of warm water, which is arranged along the spinning frame, so that the spindle by its rap- id motion shall cause a fine spray to be con- stantly thrown up from the surface of the water. The yarns thus prepared do not equal in fineness some of those made by hand. They are rated at so many " leas " of 300 yards each to the pound ; in 1839 a common maximum was 150 to the pound, but they are now spun of 200 to 240 leas. Such yarn is employed for Irish lawns and coarse cambrics. The finer fabrics of cambrics and Valenciennes require hand spun yarns. The yarns are assorted into bundles, which are made up each one of 20 hanks of 10 leas each, and their quality is in- dicated either by naming the number of leas to the pound, or the direct weight of the bundle itself, an eight-pound bundle being one of 25 leas to the pound, and a two-pound bundle one of 100 leas to the pound. To make linen thread, the yarns are doubled, and after bleaching the thread is wound into balls or upon spools. In former times the sale of brown manufac- tured linens was conducted in the Irish mar- ket towns (especially in Ulster) in halls set apart for the purpose ; and in Armagh, Bally- mena, Coleraine, Ballymoney, and Lurgan the practice is still continued. These sales, how- ever, are only of hand-loom goods, the power- loom productions being sold direct to the mer- chants. The great business in these is con- ducted by private contracts, and through the agency of commission houses in Belfast ; and to such an extent has it increased, that a single establishment now makes little of furnishing 2,000 or 3,000 pieces of linen a week, when 70 years ago such an amount would have served the largest works for a whole year. The prices are said to be very difficult to quote, owing to the great variety of "sets" repre- senting the fineness and the variety in the yarns used for the " set." Each large firm has its own standard of rates. The brown linens when purchased are chiefly sent to the bleach greens, where they are boiled in a lye of soda ash, and then spread to dry for two or three days upon the grass. These processes may be repeated several times until the goods are half white. (See BLEACHING.) The straw of the flax, which cannot be perfectly extracted in the scutching and cleaning, now shows itself more plainly. To remove this the goods are soaked in a bath of water containing an alkaline chlo- ride, as of soda, and are treated, either after or before this, with dilute sulphuric acid of 2 or 3 Twaddell. The " rubbing " succeeds, which is a thorough washing by machinery, with the use of plenty of soap. When the linen is quite white it is starched, and afterward dried on steam-heated rollers. It is then ready for the " finishing " process, which is effected by ma- chines called " beetles," or by the patent method of spreading the linens on frames in a stove house, and, while they are gently stretched and carefully handled upon these, exposing them to a current of air which is made to pass continu- ally over them. A finish is thus obtained like that of linen pocket handkerchiefs. The whole time required for bleaching is from four to seven weeks, according to the season and the weight of the fabric. The extreme whiteness given to some linens is often at the expense of their strength, the material being partially worn out in the operation. A fair, even shade, at- tainable by all intelligent bleachers, ought to suffice if it be desirable to produce the best quality of goods. Linens that are not to be bleached are either finished brown, or are col- ored before finishing; and some are partly bleached and dyed. Many goods have lately been first bleached and then printed with fancy patterns. The chief kinds of manufactured linen are lawn, cambric, damask, diaper, sheet- ing, and towelling. The countries in which the manufacture of linen is most extensive- ly carried on are France, Belgium, and, Great Britain. The principal seats of the manufac- ture in Great Britain are in and near the West riding of Yorkshire, in Lancashire, Dorset- shire, Durham, and Shropshire, in Dundee in Scotland, and Belfast in Ireland. The manu- facture of linen was introduced into the United States by the establishment of a large mill in 1834 at Fall River, Mass. ; but the industry has not increased to very great extent, most of the linen goods consumed in the United States being imported. The extent of the linen manu- facture in Great Britain is indicated by the fol- lowing statement of the number of factories employed in spinning and weaving flax in 1871 :