COTTON TEXTILES. IL 



W. E. WATT, A. M. 



COTTON is spun and woven into 

 so many useful forms that we 

 could hardly live without it 

 since we have become so thor- 

 oughly accustomed to the comforts 

 and luxuries it supplies to us. 

 From the loose fiber that we use in 

 treating our teeth when they get to 

 troubling us to the delicate lace hand- 

 kerchief which is such a dream of the 

 weaver's art we use cotton for our com- 

 monest and our most extraordinary 

 purposes. 



Muslin takes its name from Mosul, 

 in India, where it was first made. 

 Although muslin is now made in both 

 Europe and America in great quan- 

 tities, the kind that is most famed for 

 its fineness is that from Dacca, India. 

 To get an idea of the fine threads used 

 in making the rarest of this muslin we 

 must note that one pound of cotton is 

 spun into three hundred eighty 

 hanks of thread with eight hundred 

 forty yards of thread in each hank. 

 This means that one pound of cotton 

 is spun out to the length of 319,000 

 yards, or over one hundred eighty-one 

 miles. 



One pound of this thread would, if 

 it could be stretched out without break- 

 ing, reach from New York City up the 

 Hudson to Albany, and there would 

 still be enough of it unused to reach 

 over to Saratoga. Ten pounds would 

 reach from New York city to Omaha, 

 with enough left over to reach back to 

 Chicago. 



It is even possible to exceed this in 

 fineness if we do not care for use. To 

 show the perfection of a machine, a 

 thread of the fineness of 10,000 has 

 been spun. If this could be strung out, 

 as suggested above, it would reach 

 4,770 miles. One pound of the finest 

 fiber has thus been spun so that it 

 would reach from New York to Naples, 

 Italy, and there would still be enough 

 of it left to reach half-way back to 

 London on the return trip. 



Where three hundred and eighty 

 hanks of thread are spun from a pound 



the muslin made from it is called three 

 hundred eighty-degree muslin. But 

 even this is not the finest muslin made. 

 It is the finest made by the old hand 

 processes, but the perfections of ma- 

 chinery have made it possible for us to 

 have seven hundred-degree cotton. A 

 strange thing about our finest machine- 

 made cotton is that it does not seem 

 to the eye or the touch to be as fine as 

 the Dacca. There is a peculiar soft- 

 ness which cannot be imitated by the 

 machine. 



I went the other day into one of our 

 great dry-goods stores to see how fine 

 a piece of cotton I could buy. I was 

 surprised to find that the gentlemanly 

 clerks knew very little about where the 

 goods were made and almost nothing 

 at all about the processes. They were 

 very obliging, but their business of 

 selling does not seem to require any 

 knowledge of those things I was so de- 

 sirous of learning. 



The finest things I found were India 

 linen and Swiss mull. The India linen 

 has a remarkable name, seeing it is not 

 linen and is made in Scotland. The 

 Swiss mull is nearly as well named, for 

 it is also made in Glasgow. Whether 

 these goods sell better because their 

 names seem to indicate that they are 

 made somewhere else I cannot say, but 

 the truth seems, to be that they were 

 called by these names innocently 

 enough by those who first made them, 

 being proud that they could produce 

 mull equal to the finest worn by the 

 ladies in Switzerland or equal to the 

 finest products of the Indian looms. 



It is well known that in the dry- 

 goods business it seems to be greatly 

 to the advantage of the merchant to 

 have fine names for his wares, the 

 larger houses regularly emplo)'ing 

 women who do nothing but find fancy 

 names for the things that are for sale. 

 Goods are sometimes displayed with 

 one name for several days without find- 

 ing a purchaser, but the namer soon 

 comes in with a new name to attach to 

 the goods and some of the very shop- 



