Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/432

 *[Footnote:

2. The smooth and slim structure of the filaments, which gives to linen its peculiar polished aspect, and feel so different from cotton, and especially from woollen stuffs, unless when disguised by dressing. The fibres of flax have no mutual entanglement, whereby one can draw out another as with wool, and they must therefore be made adhesive by moisture. This wetting of the fibres renders them more pliant and easier to twist together

3. The small degree of elasticity, by which the simple fibres can be stretched only one twenty-fifth of their natural length before they break, while sheep's wool will stretch from one fourth to one half before it gives way.

Good flax should have a bright silver gray or yellowish color (inclining neither to green nor black); it should be long, fine, soft, and glistening, somewhat like silk, and contain no broad tape-like portions, from undissevered filaments. Tow differs from flax in having shorter fibres, of very unequal length, and more or less entangled. Hemp agrees in its properties essentially with flax, and must be similarly treated in the spinning processes.

The manufacture of linen and hemp yarn, and the tow of either, may be effected by different processes; by the distaff, the hand-wheel, and spinning machinery. It will be unnecessary to occupy the pages of this volume with a description of the first two well known domestic employments. Spinning of flax by machinery has been much more recently brought to a practical state than the spinning of cotton and wool by machines, of which the cause must be sought for in the nature of flax as above described. The first attempts at the machine spinning of flax, went upon the principle of cutting the filaments into short fragments before beginning the operation. But in this way the most valuable property of linen yarn, its cohesive force, was greatly impaired; or these attempts were restricted to the spinning of tow, which on account of its short and somewhat tortuous fibres, could be treated like cotton, especially after it had been further torn by the carding engine. The first tolerably good results with machinery seem to have been obtained by the brothers Girard at Paris, about the year 1810. But the French have never carried the apparatus to any great practical perfection. The towns of Leeds in Yorkshire, of Dundee in Scotland, and Belfast in Ireland, have the merit of bringing the spinning of flax by machines into a state of perfection little short of that for which the cotton trade has been so long celebrated.

For machine spinning, the flax is sometimes heckled by hand, and sometimes by machinery. The series of operations is the following:—

1. The heckling.

2. The conversion of the flax into a band of parallel rectilinear filaments, which, forms the foundation of the future yarn.

3. The formation of a sliver from the riband, by drawing it out into a narrower range of filaments.

4. The coarse spinning, by twisting the sliver into a coarse and loose thread.

5. The fine spinning, by the simultaneous extension and twisting of that coarse thread.

All heckle machines have this common property, that the flax is not drawn through them, as in working by hand, but, on the contrary, the system of heckles is moved through the flax properly suspended or laid. Differences exist in the shape, arrangement, and movements of the heckles, as also in regard to the means]*