290 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The first attempts at the mechanical spinning of wool were 

 made at about the same time in France and England. We read 

 of a machine experimentally tried at Dolphin Holme in 1784, but 

 success did not come until 1791. In 1780 the French Government 

 gave three thousand livres to an Englishman named Price for 

 the invention of a machine suitable for spinning combed wool. 



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Fig. 10. A Wool Spinning-wheel. A, hand-cards; B, bobbin of roving. 



Toward the close of the century M. Simonis, of Verviers, built a 

 machine, by the aid of which three persons could spin four hun- 

 dred hanks of yarn per day. The English succeeded about the 

 same time in spinning combed wool upon one of Arkwright's 

 machines. 



The latter half of the eighteenth century witnessed the partu- 

 rition of automatic textile manufacture. Invention seemed to 

 suddenly awake from a lethargy of thousands of years. One 

 labor-saving machine followed another with astonishing rapidity. 

 The inventions of Kay, Hargreaves, Crompton, Arkwright, Watt, 

 Cartwright, and a host of others, almost contemporaneous in 

 point of time and general adoption, effected a revolution in every 

 branch of textile manufacture such as had not occurred in all 

 previous time, and whose like we can not again expect to witness. 

 No other fifty years in the world's history are comparable with 

 that half-century in their contribution to the world's capacity for 



