The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous ... - Cd3wd.com

390 CULTIVATION AND USES OF
2. The smooth and slim structure of the filaments, which gives to linen its pe-
culiar polished aspect, and feel so different from cotton, and especially from wool-
len stufiis, unless when disguised by dressing. The fibres of flax have no mutual
entanglement, whereby one can draw out another as with wool, and they must
therefore be made adhesive by moisture. This wetting of the fibres renders them
more pliant and easier to twist together
3. The jmall degree of elasticity, by which the simple fibres can be stretched
only one twenty -fifth of their natural length before they break, while sheep's wool
will stretch from one fourth to one half before it gives way.
Good fla.x should have a bright silver gray or yellowish color (inclining neither
to green nor black) ; it should be long, fine, soft, and glistening, somewhat like
\ silk, and contain no broad tape-like portions, from uudissevered filaments. Tow
difiers from flax in having shorter fibres, of very imequal length, and more or less
entangled. Hemp agrees in its properties essentially with flax, and must be simi-
larly treated in the spinning processes.
The manufacture of linen and hemp yam, and the tow of either, may bo effected
by different processes ; by the distaff", the hand-wheel, and spinning ma-
chinerj'. It will be unnecessary to occupy the pages of this volume with a de-
scription of the first two well known domestic employments. Spinning of flax by
machinery has been much more recently brought to a practical state than the
spinning of cotton and wool by machines, of which the cause must be sought for
in the nature of flax as above described. The first attempts at the machine spin-
ning of flax, went upon the principle of cutting the filaments into short fragments
before beginning the operation. But in this way the most valuable property of
linen yam, its cohesive force, was greatly impaired ; or these attempts were re-
stricted to the spinning of tow, which on account of its short and somewhat tor-
tuous fibres, could be treated hke cotton, especially after it had been further torn
by the carding engine. The first tolerably good results with machinery seem to
have been obtained by the brothers Girard at Paris, about the year 1810. But
the French have never carried the apparatus to any great practical perfection.
The towns of Leeds in Yorkshire, of Dundee in Scotland, and Belfast in Ireland,
have the merit of bringing the spinning of flax by machines into a state of perfec-
tion little short of that for which the cotton trade has been so long celebrated.
For machine spinning, the flax is sometimes heckled by hand, and sometimes
by machinery. The series of operations is the following :
1. The heckluig.
2. The conversion of the flax into a band of parallel rectilinear filaments, wliich
forms the foundation of the future yam.
3. The formation of a sliver from the riband, by drawing it out mto a narrower
range of filaments.
4. The coarse spinning, by twining the sliver into a coarse and loose thread.
5. The fine spinning, by the simultaneous extension and twisting of that coac?©
thread.
All heckle machines have this common property, that the flax is not drawn
through them, as in working by hand, but, on the contrar)', the system of heckles
is moved through the flax properly suspended or laid. Differences exist in the
shape, arrangement, and movements of the heckles, as also in regard to the means
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