The Grantville Gazette - Volume 4 Part 41

Some damasks are woven with one weft yarn for the pattern and a finer one for the binder, so that the occasional specks of weft appearing inside a pattern element are even less noticeable. The flying shuttle will be of limited use in this case. For that, the invention of John Kay's son Robert, the drop-box, which fed several shuttles in sequence, is required. The drop-box was patented in 1760 (Peake 6) Originally, the drawboy perched above the loom, drawing the necking cords. Tailcords and simples, invented in Lyons in 1606 (HOTd 189), may not have spread across Europe yet. French inventors worked on simplifying the operations further. J.M. Jacquard, building on the work of three inventors of the first half of the eighteenth century, completed the task in 1803, before power was applied to weaving at all. The mechanism of the Jacquard loom replaces the draw-loom mechanism, necking box through draw-boy.

Multiharness loom. Smaller, simple damask patterns can be produced on multiharness looms-as many as 32 harnesses, one harness for each row of the pattern. These looms will, however, often have two groups of harnesses: 8 at the front for the binding weave, and 16 or 32 at the back for the pattern weave. (In British weaving terminology, each group of shafts is a harness: the binder harness and the pattern harness.) Depressing all those treadles would, it seems, require considerable ma.s.s on the part of the weaver. By early in the eighteenth century, there was the small draw-loom, which had treadles only for the binder group, the pattern harnesses being raised by a drawboy.Treatment of fibers. Yarns used as warp require treatment if they are not to break often. How the yarns are treated depends on the ident.i.ty of the fiber: Woolen can be used as warp if it is not too soft, but it is more often used as weft on a worsted or a linen warp. Woolens can be heavy, like up-time blankets and coats, or thin; wadmal is a very thin woolen fabric.

Worsted makes a good warp, and a good weft.Linen is a strong fiber, especially when it is wet. Even single, unplied linen yarn from line flax can be used as warp. If the weaving shop is not humid, wet towels can be laid on the warp between the back beam and the shedding mechanism. If the linen is not damp enough (or even if it is), it will break, as the flax fiber has no elasticity. Up-time, it is coated with a paste of Irish moss (Chondrus crispus).Cotton used as warp must be sized to keep the warp yarn from breaking too often. Boiled rabbit skins are sometimes used by up-time hobby weavers; a flour paste with tallow, and sometimes paraffin, is used

commercially. Cotton can be used as weft on warps of worsted or linen.Broken warp threads are dealt with immediately. The hand weaver will darn a new thread into the cloth and tie the other end to the broken warp thread, then weave to the knot. He will then remove the knot and darn the ends in. The Weaver's Knot that Davenport (Weaving 61) recommends is the true Carrick Bend (Ashley #1439).The act of weaving. Once a loom has been dressed, the weaver is advised to weave an inch or two, to check that the draft has been executed correctly. He then falls into a rhythm. He opens the shed by depressing the appropriate treadles. He leans forward and to one side, positions the shuttle at the end of the shed, and, with a snap of his wrist, throws the shuttle through the shed, the full width of the warp. He quickly leans to the other side, and catches the shuttle with his other hand, and stops the rotation of the spindle with a fingertip to keep more weft thread than needed from being left in the shed. With his free hand, he yanks the beater forward to position the weft thread properly against the fell.

Each of these actions must be properly timed, in sequence. When the weaver has woven a few inches, the warp must be advanced: a few inches of warp must be let off the warp beam and a few inches of cloth taken up on the cloth beam, with the tension of the warp being maintained. Every few inches, but not at the same time as let-off and take-up, the temple must be advanced. The temple, or stretcher, keeps the warp as wide as it should be instead of getting narrower as it is woven. It is two laths, each about half as long as the cloth is wide, hinged together so they are end to end. A flat side of the outside ends holds pins, which are inserted into the new cloth near its edges; the temple is then flattened. Without a temple, the piece of cloth may be not a rectangle, but a trapezoid. It is required on woolens, and advisable on all others.

Power looms.

In 1785, Dr. Edmund Cartwright patented the very first power loom; he designed it without having ever seen a loom, and, surprisingly, his design did not work (Barker 9). He patented his second design in 1787. Other designs were patented over the next fifteen years, and finally, very early in the nineteenth century, power looms overcame-or outlived-the weavers who wanted nothing to do with them. However, only wool and worsted could be woven on them. Power weaving of cotton was delayed by the need for sizing, as the sizing could be applied only to warp that had been let off the warp beam. It was not until 1836 that sizing the warp before it was wound on the warp beam was worked out (Peake 7). As linen has no elasticity, it broke too often without the feedback that only a human can supply, until the effects of a vibrating roller were found to alleviate this problem, about 1840 (Moore 71, 78).

These early power looms still had to be stopped for warp advancement and temple movement. The first automatic temple was invented in the United States, in 1816 (Chase 4). The standing beater was a necessary part of the invention.

When a warp thread breaks, the loom must stop. When the shuttle runs out of weft, or the weft breaks, the loom must stop. If the shuttle does not exit the shed as it should, the loom must stop immediately-beating the shuttle into the cloth is total catastrophe. Automatic stop-actions that do not vibrate or shake the entire mechanism are needed for each of these certainties, if each loom is not to be attended by its own personal fast-reacting weaver.

Broken warp threads are dealt with immediately by up-time industrial weavers, but, it seems, differently from the way the hand-weaver does. The knots that Clifford Ashley, who was consulted by the twentieth-century weaving industry, reports as having been used in weaving as far back as anyone knows are all permanent knots (7881, 259), not the strong but transitory knots that a hand-weaver prefers. Ashley implies that commercial cloth keeps those knots forever.

Another difficult item to automate is the beater, which beats the latest shot of weft up against the fell of the cloth. This beating must not be too hard or too light; the correct amount varies according to the type of cloth being woven. A weft-face textile requires a harder beat than an even weave does. Down-time, beaters are pendant; up-time, hand-looms can have either a pendant or a standing beater. Up-time powered looms have standing beaters.

Finishing.

Down-time, all textiles are inspected for mistakes in the weave, of either warp or weft; the menderscorrect these as best they can with needle and thread. The pieces are then burled: knots, knops, neps, foreign matter, anything affecting the appearance and the acceptance of dye, are searched for and removed. This must be done before the piece can be approved by guild and city council quality inspection teams. They will need to be washed, bleached if the yarn was not bleached and dyed before it was woven, and pressed or calendered.

Woolen textiles, including those of woolen weft over linen or worsted warp, are fulled, matted and shrunk (when this is done to unwoven wool, it is called felted). Fulling mills exist down-time, with wooden drop-hammers operated by waterwheels (Hartley 136). Fulling makes the fabric less likely to tear, and shrinks it about 50% (CHWTa 205). Next, it is tentered: the selvages are hooked on pins fastened to heavy lengths of lumber to stretch the fabric out evenly; this does not counter the shrinking. Then it is teased and shorn: the piece is laid over a board, thistle heads set in a frame are used to raise loose fibers and ends, and shears are used to cut these off. The gig mill, for raising the fibers, was invented no later than the sixteenth century (HOTc 172); the textile is carried on a leather belt past teasels-and its use was not widespread. The saving in man- and boy-power is significant, personnel requirements dropping from 18 men and 6 boys to 2 men and 1 boy (CHWTa 205), although shearing still had to be done by hand. Various methods of mechanical shearing were invented late in the eighteenth century, leading to a spinning cylinder bearing a spiraling blade at the end of that century (HOTe 3045)-which was still marveled at early in the twentieth (Hunter 62).Worsted textiles are subjected to a process called crabbing, which evens the tension so that the threads do not pull up unevenly over time.

Both woolen and worsted fabrics are pressed by being folded accordion-style into presses.

Linen is polished, laid flat on a board so that the flat side of a stone, or perhaps of a lump of gla.s.s, can be rubbed over it.Cotton has loose fiber ends; the cure is singeing, done by pa.s.sing the fabric over a source of heat, originally a hot copper plate, later a gas flame-followed immediately by quenching.Linen and cotton fabrics are calendered: pressed between rollers.

Acceptability of Innovations.

Some of the new procedures will be welcome; others will not be. Jobs, wages, and product quality will be questioned. Even if farmers and prospective mill owners have capital to expend now for increased profit later, spinsters and weavers will fear for their jobs-as they have done in centuries past. New textile machines (spinning wheel, gig mill) were prohibited by law, in the German states, in France, and in England, as early as the thirteenth century, partly over quality concerns, but also for job protection.

Spinning.

Spinsters are self-employed, and may not want to work in a mill at someone else's orders. A cottage spinster chooses her own hours for spinning. Hand-spinning can be stopped at any moment if a toddler or infant screams; spinsters who work in mills will have to find others to care for their children.

Up-timers know that modern sewing thread is very strong, but it is polyester. Few will remember the mercerized cotton thread that could be snapped between fists. Even fewer will remember the days when clerks in fabric departments would tear cotton fabrics from the bolt, instead of using shears to cut it. Up-timers will also know how fine and smooth up-time thread, both sewing and woven, is, and may think that handspun always means thicker, slubbier, and weaker-which it does not. Human fingers are marvellous tools, but up-time hobby weavers have learned that if their yarn is slub-free, people accuse them of pa.s.sing off machine-spun yarn as their own work. Down-timers may well have opposite suspicions of machines, especially if they are not properly tested before being revealed.

In OTL, the machines were first developed to handle cotton, and modified to deal with linen and wool, but there is still a maximum length allowed. Up-time, many sheep are sheared twice a year, instead of the old standard of once. Line flax of 20 to 30 inches will be no more; up-time flax must be cut short, perhaps as short as 3 to 5 inches (Crockett 175). Effectively, all flax up-time is tow, and more twists per inch are required. Perhaps the up-time inventors, lacking knowledge of modern machinery and the OTL abundance of cotton, will develop machines intended for linen and wool as they are, not as they have been modified to suit.

In OTL, machinery could not produce linen yarn as fine as hand-spinning could, until wet-spinning machinery was developed in the 1820s (CHWTc 478).

Weaving.

Weavers pride themselves on the quality of their finished goods. The German cities with major cloth-production have quality inspection teams, from weaving guild and city council, who stamp each piece that meets minimum standards. When rogue weavers, usually farmers in the surrounding territory, counterfeit-stamp their own pieces of cloth, the cities adopt new stamps.

The weaving guild of each city has two levels: masters and journeymen. A master weaver has worked his way up through the ranks until he could produce a masterwork (demonstrating his ability to design and create) and ama.s.s the funds necessary to purchase his own home and looms and to employ journeymen. The master weavers define the names applied to textiles, determining the fiber content, the thread count, and the weave necessary for a particular textile. They set minimum and maximum prices, to avoid both undercutting each other and overcharging the customer.

In the German-speaking states, a journeyman weaver is at least eighteen years old, and has put in three years as an apprentice, to learn the basics of the craft. He becomes a journeyman when three journeymen decide he has learned all an apprentice must and sponsor him. And then he must journey-to another town, where he reports to the Gasthaus frequented by the journeymen of that town. The head journeyman checks his bona fides-where he apprenticed and who sponsored him-and leads him to a weaver with a job opening. He is expected to join the guild of the town. The journeymen of the town meet at the Gasthaus about once a week, paying their dues, electing a new head journeyman when called for, and then draining their steins between songs.

Guild dues are a source of relief to members too sick to work, to bereaved dependents, and so forth. Much social life is organized through the guild. A master weaver can hire only through the head journeyman.

Luddites and featherbedders.

Over the centuries, workers have objected to their jobs being made redundant by machines. Inventors have often moved from one city to another, after the first production run of their machines: James Hargreaves set up a building full of spinning jennys, which were destroyed by his townsmen. Barthelemy Thimmonier in France had 80 sewing machines in use; his fellow tailors destroyed them.

Up-time, destruction is not as common, but the twentieth century has seen objections from auto workers, steelworkers, longsh.o.r.emen, railroadmen, those in the printing trades, and many more-all of whom wanted job security rather than an easy way for the few to do the work of many. Even musicians have objected to the theater practice of hiring only the number of musicians needed for a play's music, rather than as many as can fit into the s.p.a.ce provided by the theater's architect. "Solutions" have included delays in adopting innovation, keeping unnecessary positions filled, and encouraging early retirement: American automobile factories fell behind those elsewhere; the railroads had to maintain firemen, ready to shovel coal into diesel engines; dockyard workers were supported by a make-up and pension fund set up by union and management together.

Even if there are jobs available in other fields, how many workers will be willing to learn a new skillset? Those who keep their jobs worry about their pay. Will it be piecework, or time? There are many arguments on this issue, both directions. Pay by the piece must be set high enough that a worker can earn enough to live on. Those who work quickly can earn more; quality inspection is required to separate the deft from the hasty. In the view of the business owner, hourly wages will encourage slackness. Finally, there is capital expenditure: who can invest in invention and development? Do the fiber merchants, master weavers, and drapers have the capital necessary to purchase these new machines? Improvements will provide savings over time, but the initial expense can be great.

Conclusion Technological advances in the textile industry have many aspects, requirements, and effects. Machines must be invented and tested. The site of the factory or mill must be chosen carefully, preferably near water power, without taking land out of cultivation. Transportation of the raw material and the finished goods must be facilitated. The resistance to new ways of those already in the field must be overcome.

As in OTL, it will take time.

Further Reading and Partial Bibliography CHWT = Cambridge History of Western Technology; EA = Encyclopedia Americana; EB = Encyclopaedia Britannica, with the number immediately following "EB" indicating the edition; HOT = A History of Technology.

Those works of particular use to authors are marked with an asterisk.

Amos, Alden. Spinning Wheel Primer. Loveland CO: Interweave Press, 1990.

Ashley, Clifford W. The Ashley Book of Knots. Garden City NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1944.

Aspin, C. and S.D. Chapman. James Hargreaves and the Spinning Jenny. Helmsh.o.r.e Local History Society. Preston UK: The Guardian Press, 1964.

Barber, E.J.W. Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Barker, A.F., M.Sc. Textiles. Rev. Ed. London: Constable & Company Limited, 1922.

Cambridge History of Western Textiles. 2 volumes. Ed. David Jenkins. Cambridge University Press, 2003.a"Medieval Woollens: Textiles, Technology and Organisation 8001500." John H. Munrob"The Western European Woollen Industries 15001700." Herman van der Wee.c"The Linen Industry in Early Modern Europe." Leslie Clarkson.

Chase, William. H. Five Generations of Loom Builders. Hopedale MA: Draper Corporation, 1950.

Crockett, Candace. The Complete Spinning Book. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1977.

Davenport, Elsie G.. Your Handspinning. Tarzana CA: Select Books, 1964.

----. Your Handweaving. Tarzana CA: Select Books, 1951.

Dulles, Foster Rhea. Labor in America. Binghamton NY: Vail-Ballou Press, 1966.

Elliott, Connie. Member, Contemporary Handweavers of Houston. Personal Communication, May 2004.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition. New York: The Encyclopaedia Britannica Company, 1911.a"Cotton." A.N. Monkhouse. Vol. 7.b"Cotton Manufacture." Sydney John Chapman, M.A. Vol. 7.c"Cotton Spinning Machinery." Thomas William Fox, M.Sc.Tech. Vol. 7.d"Flax." Thomas Woodhouse. Vol. 10.e"Linen and Linen Manufactures." Thomas Woodhouse. Vol. 16.f"Silk." Frank Warner, et al. Vol. 25.g"Spinning." Thomas William Fox, M.Sc.Tech. Vol. 25.h"Spinning Machinery." Thomas William Fox, M.Sc.Tech. Vol. 25.i"Weaving." Alan Summerly Cole, C.B. Vol. 28.j"Wool, Worsted & Woollen Manufacturing." Aldred Farrer Barker, M.Sc. Vol. 28.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th Edition. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher, 1972.a"Cotton." John Melvin Green. Vol. 6.b"Cotton Manufacture." Alan Ewart Nuttall. Vol. 6.c"Farm Machinery." Walter M. Carlton and Eugene C. McKibbon. Vol. 9.d"Fibre" (Plant Fibres). Mills Herbert Byrom and Ernest Ralph Kaswell. Vol. 9.e"Fibre" (Animal & Mineral Fibre). Ernest Ralph Kaswell. Vol. 9.f"Flax." John H.Martin. Vol. 9.g"Silk," Part I: History. Unsigned. Vol. 20.h"Silk," Part III: Sericulture. Unsigned. Vol. 20.i"Silk," Part V: Silk Manufacture. Milton H. Rubin. Vol. 20.j"Spinning." Virginia P. Partridge and Frank Charnley. Vol. 21.k"Technology, History of." Unsigned. Vol. 21.l"Textiles." N.K.A. Rothstein. Vol. 21.

Encyclopedia Americana. "Textiles," Part 3: Fabric Construction. Evelyn E. Stout. Vol.

26. Danbury CT: Grolier, Inc., 1999.

Feldman-Wood, Florence. The Spinning Wheel Sleuth: http://www.spwhsl.com/. FAQ page: accessed January 2004. Personal e-mails: January 25 and March 17, 2004.

Foxfire 2; Foxfire 10. New York: Anchor Books, 1973; 1993.

Geijer, Agnes. A History of Textile Art. Pasold Research Fund Ltd. in a.s.sociation with Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications. London: Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd., 1979.

* Hanton, William A., M.Sc.Tech. Mechanics of Textile Machinery. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924.

Harris, Jennifer. "I: A Survey of Textile Techniques." Textiles: 5,000 Years (edited by J. Harris). The Trustees of the British Museum. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, 1993.

Hartley, Dorothy. Lost Country Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.

Hartsuch, Bruce E. Introduction to Textile Chemistry. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1950.

Hilts, Patricia, ed. The Weavers Art Revealed. Vols. 13 and 14 of Ars Textrina. (Facsimile, translation, and commentary, Marx Ziegler's Weber Kunst und Bild Buch, 1677, and Nathanael Lumscher's Neu eingerichtetes Weber Kunst und Bild Buch, 1708). Winnipeg, Manitoba: Charles Babbage Research Centre, December 1990.

A History of Technology. 5 volumes. Vol. II, The Mediterranean Civilizations and the Middle Ages; Vol. III, From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution c. 1500-c. 1750; and Vol IV, The Industrial Revolution c. 1750-c. 1850). Ed. Charles Singer, et al. London: Oxford University Press, 1957.

aVol. II: "Spinning." R. Patterson.

bVol. II: "Machines." Bertrand Gille.

cVol. III: "Spinning and Weaving." R. Patterson.

dVol. III: "Figured Fabrics." J.F. Flanagan.

eVol. IV: "The Textile Industry." Julia de L. Mann.

Hooper, Luther. Silk: Its Production & Manufacture. (Pitman's Common Commodities of Commerce.) London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., N.D. (1911).

Hunter, J.A. Wool: From the Raw Material to the Finished Product. (Pitman's Common Commodities of Commerce.) London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., N.D. (1912).

Moore, Alfred S. Linen: From the Raw Material to the Finished Product. (Pitman's Common Commodities of Commerce.) London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd., N.D. (1914).