178 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



intricate, the most delicate, the most variable, of any of the fibers ; 

 and for this reason among others it deserves to rank, as it does, 

 as the textile industry requiring the most brains and demanding 

 the largest resources of art and skill. The intricacies of its manip- 

 ulation are unending. They commence with the purchase of the 

 wool itself. The variations of the fiber in quality and character 

 and condition are almost infinite. Particular fabrics can only be 

 produced from particular wools. The successful blending of the 

 fiber preliminary to manufacture is an art in itself. Both the 

 dye-house and the loom-room are schools of art, where the suc- 

 cessful manufacturer must feel the pulse of the popular taste, 

 and learn to minister to its whims and caprices. His weaves 

 must change, his patterns must be varied, his coloring must be in 

 good taste, his finish must be perfect. The broadest education 

 in mechanics, in chemistry, in art, is necessary to the perfectly 

 equipped woolen manufacturer. 



Prior to the spinning and weaving, and undoubtedly the first 

 artificial clothing worn by man, was the felted cloth, which origi- 

 nated in Asia, the cradle of the human race. Those primeval 

 men discovered and utilized the felting property of wool that 

 singular peculiarity which distinguishes it from all other fibers 

 but without the slightest understanding of the philosophy of the 

 property or the causes which led to it. It was not, indeed, until 

 1853 that the explanation of this property was revealed. In that 

 year William Youatt, to whose investigations we owe our first 

 real knowledge of the character of wool, discovered by the micro- 

 scope that the roughness and friction of the fiber, when rubbed 

 by the fingers in the reverse direction of its growth, were due to 

 an indefinite number of imbricated rings, or scales, around the 

 stem of the fiber. He detected as many as twenty-four hundred 

 of these scales, or serrations, to an inch of fiber, and the number 

 has since been found to reach as high as four thousand in some 

 instances of fine Saxony wools. It is a suggestive illustration of 

 the crab-like methods of human progress that the first utilization 

 of wool should have grown out of a property the nature of which 

 remained unknown down to the last generation of manufacturing. 



An illustration of the intimacy of the most modern and most 

 ancient of civilizations is found in the fact that it was left for 

 an American citizen to first successfully essay the mechanical 

 fabrication of felted cloths. Thomas Robinson Williams, of 

 South Kingston, R I., invented the process of making felted 

 cloths of commercial length, and patented it May 22, 1830.* Since 

 that day felts have appeared in innumerable forms as printed 



* An earlier American patent, dated October 19, 1807, was obtained by Joseph Tit- 

 kins and Timothy Kimball, hat-makcrs,.of East Hartford, Conn., which not only covered 

 machinery for planking hats, but " for making cloth without yarn." 



