AMERICAN INDUSTRIES SINCE COLUMBUS. 



l 93 



slubbers frequently maltreated the children they employed. It 

 was not until 1826, as we have seen, that the invention of Gould- 

 ing, by making automatic roving possible, dispensed with the 

 labor of children in this branch. Goulding's invention was as 

 large a gain to humanity as to the manufacture. 



Until recent years, the raw material was fed upon the cards by 

 hand. Before the invention of feed rolls and endless apron, the 

 wool was held in the hand against the revolving surface of the 

 card-roller until it was seized by its teeth. Then a " feed-sheet " 

 of cotton cloth was invented ; then the lattice-apron. By both 

 these devices the wool was taken from the feed-roll directly by 

 the main cylinder of the card. Then came the " tumbler," inter- 

 posed between the feed-rolls and the cylinder ; then the wooden 

 " licker-in " was added, and years later the metallic burr-roller, 

 invented by Francis Alton Calvert. In 18G4 a Belgian inventor, 

 Jean Sebastian Bolette, invented a machine which measured the 

 wool as it fed the card, and regulated the supply automatically. 

 Still another machine, the work of an American inventor, William 

 Calvert Bramwell, mixes as well as weighs the wool, throws out 

 much of the remaining refuse, and permits a carding machine to 

 turn out from twenty-five to forty per cent more work than was 

 possible by hand-feeding. These automatic feeders, and additional 

 series of equally ingenious machines for transferring the wool 

 from one card to the other, and the improvement of the card 

 itself, have enormously increased its productive capacity. Fifty 

 pounds of clean wool a day was a very fair average for the card- 

 ing engine of twenty-five years ago. This average has now in- 

 creased to one hundred and one hundred and fifty pounds a day, 

 according to the width of the carding machine and its cylinders, 

 and the quality and character of the materials employed. 



It is astonishing to watch these monster engines, grim as 

 implements of war and death, absorb the tangled wool in their 

 greedy jaws, draw it tenderly upon their bewildering mass of 

 rapidly revolving wheels, cylinders, and rollers armed with sharp 

 teeth, shake from it any remaining dirt or foreign substance, 

 whirl it rapidly round and round and in and out, and finally de- 

 liver it in the form of a dainty, white film, which another attach- 

 ment gathers automatically into balls or rolls, ready for the pre- 

 liminary processes of spinning. 



Modern carding accomplishes four things essential to success- 

 ful manufacture : the thorough blending of the component fibers ; 

 their rearrangement in a form somewhat parallel ; their final 

 cleansing of all refuse matter ; and their union and condensation 

 into a continuous thread called the sliver. To accomplish these 

 ends with the utmost speed, with a minimum of waste, without 

 injury to the delicate fiber, is the function of the modern carding 



VOL. XXXIX. 15 



