An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology part 87 pdf

PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 842 the ring frame has been adapted to spin a greater range of fibres and also to do in one operation the work of two or three earlier roving and spinning machines. In the 1960s it largely replaced the mules in all sections of the textile industry thanks to its greater simplicity and productivity. Open end spinning The ring frame itself began to be replaced during the 1970s by open end or break spinning. The problem with the older ways of spinning has been that the package containing the spun yarn has had to be rotated to put in the twist. The weight increasing as it filled, prevented high speeds and limited its size. During the 1950s the Shirley Institute in Manchester experimented with some ways of break spinning, but it was not until 1960 that the first commercial open end spinning machine was marketed by the Czechoslovakians. A sliver of fibres is fed to an opening device, usually a spiked roller or drum, and drawn apart so that the fibres move forward more or less individually. They are carried by an air stream and collected on the inner surface of a cup-shaped rotor with a hole in the end which revolves at 30,000–60,000rpm. During each revolution a thin layer of fibres is deposited in a collecting groove on the inner surface of the cup. Layers of fibres are laid one upon another until a strand is built up. This is peeled from the groove and twisted by the rotor as it is drawn out of the hole in the end. From here the strand, or yarn is wound on to a bobbin. Open end spinning has a very high rate of production and has been developed to give a fine quality yarn with some of the characteristics of that spun on the mule. In 1964 the Repco self-twist spinning machine was patented. A pair of rovings is drawn out and passed through aprons which are moved from side to side to give a false twist. The twist lies alternately in opposite directions and would soon untwist itself but, while one roving moves straight forward, the other goes round guides so that, when it meets its pair, they are twisted in opposite directions. As the fibres try to untwist themselves, they combine into a single loosely twisted yarn which is suitable for knitting into woollen pullovers and similar garments. Once again, the rate of production is very high. Weaving Sizing Sizing was essential with cotton warps to give them sufficient strength and tenacity. Without it, the threads would not have stood up to the friction in the loom. Two threads usually passed between each slot or ‘dent’ in the reed and, every time the heddles changed the shed, these threads rubbed past each other. TEXTILES AND CLOTHING 843 Then the motion of the reed backwards and forwards and the shuttle passing across caused constant friction which would have soon worn through the warp threads unless they were properly sized. For handlooms, sizing seems to have been carried out in two stages. The yarn was measured off into the correct length, removed from the warping frame or drum and coiled into a ball which was boiled for some hours in size before being dried. Once in the loom, more size had to be applied which was put on short stretches of the warp and allowed to dry before it could be woven. Sizing may have taken up to one-third of the weaver’s time and labour and compelled him to stop weaving for long periods. For the powerloom to become fully economic, the warps had to be prepared before they were ‘entered’ into the loom so that weaving could be continuous. Ironically, the solution was found by William Radcliffe of Stockport who was seeking to improve handlooms. He took out a patent in 1804 (m the name of one of his workmen, Thomas Johnson, so that it could not easily be traced) for a machine on which the warps could be dressed with size, dried and wound on a beam ready to be put into the back of the loom. He used a current of air with fans to dry the yarn, but later these were replaced by steam-heated drying cylinders. This proved to be the key to continuous weaving on the powerloom and the same process is still used today. The powerloom While the actual mechanics of a powerloom are quite simple, the refinements necessary to make it work properly are difficult to achieve, as Edmund Cartwright found to his cost. For example, it is necessary to prevent the shuttle rebounding out of its box. The handloom weaver does this by tensioning the picker peg and releasing it when he feels the shuttle hit it. On the powerloom, the same result has to be attained by leather buffer straps and side springs in the shuttle box. Should the shuttle become stuck in the warp, the loom will beat up the reed and force the shuttle into the warp threads, breaking them, unless it is stopped instantly. Sometimes a loose reed is fitted which can hinge back if it hits an obstruction. In either case, a brake to stop the loom is essential. Should the weft break or run out, then there must be a weft-stop motion to put on the brake, and ideally there should be a warp-stop motion for when a warp thread breaks. Also there was the problem of winding the cloth on precisely the same amount each pick so that the beating up was even. This was solved by the sand roller, which had a rough surface to grip the cloth. Many people contributed to the development of the powerloom. For example, Austin of Glasgow used cams in 1789 to work the picking stick to throw the shuttle and some of his looms were built in Scotland in 1800. Robert Millar of Dumbartonshire in 1796 patented an improved protector which PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 844 stopped the loom altogether when the shuttle failed to enter its box. Between 1803 and 1813, Messrs Marsland & Horrocks of Stockport, Cheshire, patented various improvements including the crank for operating the reed. During the 1820s, Richard Roberts continued to make improvements and constructed his powerloom principally out of cast iron. Therefore the numbers of powerlooms increased steadily from around 2400 in 1804 to 14,150 in 1820, 55,500 in 1829 and 100,000 in 1833. On most of these early looms, only plain cloth could be woven, such as cotton calico or sheeting. Richard Roberts was also partly responsible for adapting the powerloom to weave simple patterns. Raising the different sets of heddles was contrived by using wheels with projections which caused the appropriate heddle to be lifted. By 1838, eight changes of pattern could be worked in this way, but a really satisfactory system was not evolved for another twenty years, when the Blackburn dobby appeared. On a dobby, pegs, inserted into small bars made up into a continuous chain, lift levers to raise the appropriate heddle. Where no peg has been inserted, that heddle remains down. Dobbies can control quite complex patterns on up to 18 heddles or shafts. In about 1846, Squire Diggle of Bury mechanized the drop box so that different types or colours of wefts could be used and later this too was controlled by the dobby. In the 1830s power-driven Jacquard looms began to be introduced from the silk industry to weaving worsted and the Jacquard has remained in use ever since for weaving complex patterns, today sometimes controlled by a computer. Automatic looms On the traditional Lancashire loom, the weaver had to stop weaving to fit a full pirn in the shuttle each time it ran out of weft. Between 1889 and 1894 an Englishman, J.H.Northrop, took out various patents for a loom in which the weft package in the shuttle was changed automatically when one was empty. The first Northrop loom was made by the Draper Corporation in the USA in 1894. Each time the shuttle went into one of the boxes, a feeler was poked in through a slot in its side. As the weft was unwound, the feeler penetrated further until it triggered a mechanism which pushed another full pirn into the shuttle and ejected the empty one through a hole in the bottom. The full pirns were stored in a rotary holder which was replenished manually. Self-threading shuttles had to be designed, which helped to lower the incidence of weaver’s pneumosilicosis caused by breathing in dust as they sucked the weft through the hole in the end of the old shuttles. Warp-stop motions were also fitted to Northrop looms so that all the weaver had to do was to repair breakages of warp or weft and refill the pirn-holder. Although Northrop looms were introduced to Britain around 1900, they never became very popular because they could weave with only one type of TEXTILES AND CLOTHING 845 weft and the British textile industry specialized in a variety of fancy fabrics. While in 1909 the USA had 200,000 Northrop looms compared to 8000 in Britain, 95 per cent of all American looms were automatic by 1930, compared with only 5 per cent in Britain. The Northrop became the most popular of the automatic looms and many are still in use. To reduce further the number of weavers needed to supervise them, in 1957 the Leesona Corporation’s Unifil winder was introduced to the European market. Here the pirns are wound on the loom itself, so that, instead of 2–300 being necessary for each loom on the old system, the Unifil needed only twelve, and only half a dozen of these were full of yarn. The empty ones were stripped of any remaining weft and returned to the top for rewinding. The days of looms with shuttles are numbered because, for many years people have been experimenting with ways of inserting the weft without wasting the energy that a shuttle requires to accelerate it through the warp, only to be lost as the shuttle strikes its box. Sulzer Brothers of Switzerland took out their first patent in 1929 for a loom in which a small gripper or bullet 8.75cm (3.5in) long is shot across the loom from one side. It pulls a shoot of weft off a cone, passes through the shed, releases the weft and is returned underneath to the starting position. A number of bullets enable high weaving speeds to be maintained, often at the rate of over 300 picks per minute compared with the 120 of a Lancashire loom. The ends of the weft are tucked into the warp to form a neat selvedge. A single-coloured-weft machine was available commercially in 1950, two colours in 1955 and four in 1959. By 1969, over 20,000 of these looms had been sold, even though the precision engineering necessary in their construction made them very expensive. In the meantime, a successful rapier loom had been developed by the Draper Corporation in 1945. A sword stick, or rapier, takes the weft from one side of the loom to the middle, where another grips it and pulls it through the rest of the way. Various manufacturers offer these looms today. Next people concentrated on abolishing bullets or rapiers altogether by using air or water jets instead to shoot the weft across. Max Paabo produced his air-jet Maxbo loom in 1954, which runs more quietly and quickly than ordinary looms. In the following year the Czechoslovak engineer Vladimir Svaty introduced a water-jet loom at the Brussels exhibition. The water-jet loom is suitable only for certain types of synthetic fibres which are not affected by moisture. VELVET, TOWELLING AND CARPET WEAVING Fabrics woven with a pile or loops have had a long history. In the Middle East, it is still possible to see carpets being woven in the traditional way on vertical looms. Lengths of coloured wool are knotted by women or children to the warp threads to form the pile which is trimmed with scissors to make it even. PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 846 In the traditional way of weaving velvet, there were two sets of warp threads. One made the backing or ground and was woven with weft in the usual way. But after a couple or so shoots of the weft, a rod was placed over the ground warp and under the pile warp, which was wound on a separate beam with a little friction to prevent it unwinding. The pile warp was lowered over the rod and was bound in by the next shoots of weft. After a few rods had been placed in position, the first one was taken out by cutting the loops of the pile with a sharp knife run along a fine slot along the top of the rod. Some velvet is still made in this laborious way for special royal occasions such as a coronation. Today, most velvet is woven as a double cloth. The weft threads binding the two warps together are cut to form the pile which of course separates the double cloth into two pieces of velvet. Shortly before 1850, one of the Christy Millers from the hatting family in Stockport, saw terry towelling in Turkey. After some experiments he devised a way of weaving it on powerlooms. As with velvet, two warps are used. The reed can be set in two positions to beat up the weft. With the reed in the back position, two shoots of weft are inserted. After the third shoot, the reed is put in the forward position so that it pushes the three shoots of weft along the warp. The weft slides over the ground warp, which is held tight, but the freer pile warp moves with the weft and is pushed up into loops. After the next three picks, the loops are pushed down so that the pile is formed on both sides. Towelling, or velvet if the loops are cut, can be woven with the all loops on one side if the number of picks is even. It is said that Queen Victoria saw some of this towelling at an exhibition and decided to use it in the nursery, hence the name Royal Turkish Towels. Weaving carpets by power started in the 1850s on enormous and complex machines. In one system, each pick, or row of tufts, had its own set of bobbins and each tuft its own bobbin. Each bobbin was wound with weft of the appropriate colour to form the design and a length was pulled off and knotted before the next set of bobbins was presented. E.G.Bigelow of Massachusetts invented a loom which was improved for weaving both Brussels and Wilton carpets in the 1850s and 1860s. Then cheaper carpets began to be made by having a design printed on to the weft threads wrapped round a drum. Eventually in 1876, H. Skinner of New York developed a machine for making Axminster carpets. Today, the design is sometimes printed on to cheaper carpets after they have been woven as plain ones. KNITTING MACHINES William Lee, on his original knitting machine (see p. 819), used only one yarn, which is termed weft knitting. A quicker method was warp knitting which seems to have originated in Nottinghamshire about 1775. A beam, TEXTILES AND CLOTHING 847 similar to that used in the loom with warp threads wound round it, was placed at the back of the knitting machine and the threads passed through eyelets or guides. Needles looped the threads into themselves and across to the others. The fabric that was formed was not so elastic as that made on the stocking frame but was more akin to a woven fabric and so more suitable for underwear. In 1791, William Dawson, a Leicester framework knitter, applied a notched wheel or cam for selecting patterns which led to warp knitting machines being driven by power. A circular knitting machine patented by Marc Isambard Brunel in 1816 used the bearded needle and presser. For some years it was little used because it produced only a tubular fabric. In 1847, M.Townsend of Nottingham added a mechanism which fashioned ribbed knitting on circular machines. They became popular for knitting stockings which, although not fully fashioned, had sufficient stretch to fit the leg. A.Paget of Loughborough made a circular knitting machine in 1855 which could be driven by power. Such machines became more popular when many knitting heads were placed around the circumference, which increased production because more yarns could be used at the same time. The most important nineteenth-century development in knitting was the patenting in 1856 of the latch needle by Townsend. The hook of the needle was closed by a hinged strip of metal, the latch. Normally the needle worked in a vertical or inclined position, so that the latch hung down with the previous loop on the shank below it. The principle of knitting was similar to the Lee machine except that the equivalent of the sinkers was fixed. Weft yarn was placed in the hook of the needle. The needle was drawn down between the fixed plates which replaced the sinkers, and so the new loop was formed. At the same time, the shank of the needle slid through the old loop which closed the latch and so passed over the hook, incorporating the new loop on its way. As the needle moved up again, the latch either fell open or was pushed down by the loop in the hook which moved on to the shank and so the needle was ready to receive weft again. The hinge of the latch could not be made as narrow as the bearded needle, so really fine work continued to be knitted on Lee’s machines. The latch needle so simplified knitting that soon both circular and flat-bed domestic machines appeared on which socks, gloves, pullovers and the like could be knitted at home. Another Leicestershire inventor, William Cotton, patented in 1864 a way of making fully-fashioned work that proved to be adaptable to knitting a dozen or more stockings simultaneously. This was, of course, a power-driven machine. In the USA in 1887, a machine was invented for sewing up the seams of knitted garments to prevent them unravelling. Development of knitting has continued ever since so that today computer-controlled knitting machines work at the rate of six million stitches a minute. PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 848 LACE MACHINES John Heathcote was born at Duffield near Derby in 1783 and was apprenticed to a hosiery manufacturer and framesmith. He found that a patent he had obtained in 1804 for making lace had been anticipated, so he turned his attention to the principles of making pillow or bobbin lace which he mastered in 1809. He analysed the complex array of bobbins that the lacemaker used and came to the conclusion that fundamentally there were two sets of threads. He worked out their respective movements and made one set into a warp. The other he wound on bobbins. His patent machine of 1809 made a type of net curtain, Brussels lace, without patterns. To obtain the correct movement of both warp threads and bobbins required complicated mechanisms which Heathcote was finally able to construct. He was highly praised for the excellence of his machine, but his mill at Loughborough, Leicestershire, with £10,000 worth of machines, was destroyed by the Luddites in 1816, so he moved to Tiverton in Devon where production continued until recently. Another framesmith, John Levers, brought out a variation of Heathcote’s machine in 1813, which was later adapted for making patterned lace because it used only a single row of bobbins instead of two. It was for this type of machine that, in about 1833, Hooton Deverill adapted the Jacquard mechanism to select the patterns. The Jacquard needles pushed the warp threads sideways to form the holes in the lace while the bobbins were moved round them to bind them together. Soon patterns as complex as any made by hand could be produced on these machines and lace became cheap enough for most people to be able to hang it in their windows as curtains or to use it for trimming clothing. SEWING MACHINES The invention of sewing machines had an enormous impact on the textile industry, stimulating demand for cloth because making up garments became so much quicker. They were one of the first mass-produced consumer durables. In the same way as with knitting machines, it was not possible to reproduce the stitches of the hand sewer. Two threads formed a lock-stitch, using a needle with the eye at its point. The sewing machine is essentially an American invention, for Elias Howe of Massachusetts patented a machine in 1846, although it could only sew lock-stitch in straight lines. It was improved when Isaac M. Singer of Boston, Massachusetts, produced the first practical domestic sewing machine in 1851. This initiated a big sewing-machine industry, covering new types of stitches, new types of needles, presser bars, shuttles and all sorts of other mechanisms. The adaptation of sewing machines to other industries followed quickly; for example, to the shoe industry in 1861, and they have played a prominent role in the clothing and making-up industries. TEXTILES AND CLOTHING 849 MAN-MADE FINISHES AND FIBRES Charles Macintosh, a Glasgow chemical manufacturer, found that naphtha was a solvent for rubber, so he could make a varnish that could be brushed on to cloth. The naphtha evaporated, leaving the rubber as a layer impermeable to air and water. If two pieces of this cloth were pressed together with the rubber inside, a satisfactory waterproof cloth was obtained which had no tacky surface. The first factory for producing macintosh cloth was opened in Manchester in 1824. The process was improved and speeded up by the introduction from the United States of calendering, passing the cloth between heated rollers, in 1849. The rubber industry did not really begin to grow until after the introduction of vulcanizing by Charles Goodyear, another American, in 1841. Up to that time, although very many rubber articles such as shoes were made, they were liable to become tacky with heat or solid when cold. Vulcanized rubber was stable, so that its use increased dramatically in Britain by something like 400 per cent between 1840 and 1858, when the vulcanizing patent expired. Heavy waterproof garments were replaced with lighter cloth and there was a growing demand for rubber shoes and other forms of footwear. Rubber was used increasingly in engineering industries for springs, valves, conveyor belting and so on. It was soon discovered that textile fibres could be treated with chemicals to enhance their appearance or give special characteristics. In about 1840, John Mercer of Lancashire had discovered that caustic soda would make cotton fibres more elastic and easily dyed and also, when kept in tension, give them a more lustrous effect. Mercerized cotton was not exploited commercially until about 1890 when it became one of the earliest man-made finishes. Mercer also found that cotton could be dissolved in a solution of copper oxide in ammonia, a process later exploited in the manufacture of artificial silk. Meanwhile in 1857 at Krefeld on the Rhine, it was discovered that the preliminary treatment of silk with certain metallic salts before dyeing, weighting, made the product both more lustrous and much heavier which improved the feel and the appearance. These were the forerunners of the crease and shrink resistant and the non-iron fabrics of today. Since the 1930s the range of available textiles has been widened by the proliferation of man-made fibres. One of the first people in this field was Joseph Swan, while working on the development of the incandescent electric light in 1879 (see p. 366). At first he carbonized mercerized cotton threads for the filaments of his lamps, then made them by extruding nitrocellulose dissolved in acetic acid. There was something about these silky threads which caught his attention and suggested their possibilities as a textile. He made some of special fineness, the first artificial silk, which his wife crocheted into doilies. In 1892, C.F.Cross and E.J.Bevan produced fibres by treating cellulose first with caustic soda and then with carbon disulphide to make xanthate. This was PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 850 dissolved in a solution of dilute caustic soda to produce a viscous liquid known as viscose. After being aged, it was extruded through fine holes in a spinneret and coagulated in a dilute solution to produce continuous filaments of regenerated cellulose which became known as artificial silk. In 1900 the Topham box was invented, a device for collecting the extruded filaments on the inside of a cylindrical container rotating at high speed. In 1904, Courtaulds purchased the British rights for viscose rayon so that by 1913, Britain had emerged as the largest producer, ahead of the USA. Production at this period concentrated on continuous filament yarns to rival silk. Shortly before the First World War, other ways of making rayon had been found, for example with cuprammonium viscose. The introduction of one type of artificial fibre encouraged chemists to look for more. Nylon 66, a polyamide made from adipic acid and hexamethylene diamine, was discovered by W.H.Carothers in 1937. The molten polymer was extruded through spinnerets and the cooled filaments stretched by some 400 per cent to orient the fibres. J.T.Dickinson and J.R.Whinfield made yet another synthetic fibre in 1941 from the polyester derived from terephthalic acid and ethylene gycol. Owing to restrictions imposed in Britain during the Second World War, this fibre was developed initially by the Du Pont Company in the United States, where it was marketed under the name Dacron. When ICI was able to manufacture it in Britain, it acquired the brand name Terylene. New types based on polyacrylonitrile (acrylics) appeared after the war. For example, Du Pont produced Orlon in 1945 and the Chemstrand Corporation Acrilon in 1952. These later fibres were designed to imitate wool or cotton. Although manufactured in long lengths, they had to be given the characteristics of their natural counterparts by crimping and heat-setting. They were then cut to appropriate ‘staple’ lengths so that they could be processed on the normal carding and spinning machines. While the early man-made fibres were based on cellulose, some of those developed after the Second World War were derived from chemical by-products of the oil industry. Man-made fibres have not only made today’s clothing cheaper; modern fabrics keep their shape better, are hard-wearing and easier to wash than those of earlier generations. CLOTHING MANUFACTURE Apart from the individual handwork still carried out in the bespoke tailoring and couture businesses for the few who can afford it, most clothing today is made by machinery and mass-production methods. The latter are largely dependent on the statistics of measurements to evolve a system of standard sizes which originated first from measurements taken by the Medical Department of the US Army during the First World War. Similar figures for women’s sizes did not become generally available until the 1950s. TEXTILES AND CLOTHING 851 Before the various parts are cut out to the required pattern, a roll of the cloth to be used is mounted on a Spreading Machine which traverses the bed of the machine to and fro, automatically counting the number of folds laid. The first portable cutting machine, that of Joseph Bloch, dates from 1888 and had a circular knife which was not ideal for cutting round curves. In the same year, in the USA, G.P.Eastman produced a reciprocating cutting machine which used a straight blade. SEWING Hand-sewing was carried out from about 40,000 years ago in Palaeolithic times with bone or ivory needles. The manufacture of iron sewing needles originated in Germany in the mid-fourteenth century, at first with a closed hook instead of an eye which was introduced in the Low Countries in the same century. When the process was fully developed, the needles were made in pairs, the cut wires being put inside two heated rings and rolled backwards and forwards to straighten them. Then followed the dangerous process of pointing them using a revolving stone. The eyes were then punched in pairs in a simple drop-hammer. The excess metal was then trimmed off by grinding, the pairs split before finishing by hardening and tempering, scouring and polishing, the last process taking about six days. The sewing machine is probably the most universal and important machine in clothing manufacture, being used in both industrial and domestic applications. The first working machine was built by Barthelemy Thimmonier, a working tailor of St Etienne in France in 1830. It was a chain-stitch machine, made largely of wood. He set up a factory with 80 machines to manufacture army uniforms, which was destroyed by rioting rival tailors. Although his machine was improved and patented in England and the USA, Thimmonier died impoverished in 1857. Several inventors were trying to develop a lock-stitch sewing machine in the USA, including Elias Howe who came to England where he sold the patent rights to a London maker of corsets and umbrellas, William Thomas, for £250. In 1851 Isaac Merritt Singer patented a lock-stitch machine worked by a treadle, and with a toothed wheel to advance the fabric, which proved to be at least ten times as fast as hand stitching. It was his partner, a lawyer, Edward Clark, who introduced door-to-door salesmen and hire-purchase in 1856 ($50 cash down or $100, with a cash deposit of $5 and $3 a month thereafter). The industrial Singer sewing machine was followed by the domestic model in 1858. All the early models were hand- or foot-operated. Electric motors were added to sewing machines from 1889 onwards though they found little . weighting, made the product both more lustrous and much heavier which improved the feel and the appearance. These were the forerunners of the crease and shrink resistant and the non-iron fabrics of today. Since. the hook of the needle. The needle was drawn down between the fixed plates which replaced the sinkers, and so the new loop was formed. At the same time, the shank of the needle slid through the. time the heddles changed the shed, these threads rubbed past each other. TEXTILES AND CLOTHING 843 Then the motion of the reed backwards and forwards and the shuttle passing across caused constant