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 manipulation 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 successful 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 originated 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 microscope 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.[1] Since that day felts have appeared in innumerable forms—as printed
- ↑ An earlier American patent, dated October 19, 1807, was obtained by Joseph Titkins and Timothy Kimball, hat-makers, of East Hartford, Conn., which not only covered machinery for planking hats, but "for making cloth without yarn."
