472 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



century as marking a greater advance in the textile industries 

 than all the centuries preceding it. The range of improvement 

 in the present century covers the whole ground of the evolution, 

 except the bare principle of automatic or mechanical manufacture, 

 which was still in its infancy in 1800. The nineteenth, therefore, 

 outranks even the eighteenth century in the economic progress 

 which distinguishes it. Of this tremendous advance the most 

 important steps, so far as relate to machinery for expediting 

 processes, economizing help, and performing complicated opera- 

 tions automatically, have occurred in the latter half of the present 

 century. 



The individual capacity of the operative, thus enormously in- 

 creased by machinery, has been accompanied by an increase in the 

 total number of persons solely occupied in the manufacture of wool. 

 The number who were thus employed in the period of household 

 industry can not, of course, be estimated. But a vastly larger 

 number of persons now depend directly and solely for their liveli- 

 hood upon employment in woolen-factories than was ever the case 

 before the introduction of power machinery and the factory 

 system, and they are able to earn quite double the wages of the 

 hand-operative of olden times.* It follows that the increase in 



Fig. 33. A Gabnett Machine. 



the production of woolen goods to-day is very much greater than 

 would be indicated by the fact that the labor of one operative is 

 now equivalent to that of one hundred operatives one hundred 

 and fifty years ago. This deduction is borne out by the extraor- 

 dinary increase in the world's wool-clip. It is safe to put the 

 annual product of wool at 2,000,000,000 pounds in the greasy state. 

 Of this amount nearly one half comes from three countries Aus- 

 tralia, South America, and South Africa whose wool-clip is a 



* The hand-loom weaver in the United States never earned more than fifty cents a day, 

 and in earning it he was compelled to exert himself physically to a degree not approxi- 

 mated in the management of a power-loom. Cakuoll D. Wright. 



