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The first cotton mill in the United States was in Lowell, Massachusetts , and built by Francis Cabot Lowell, who traveled to Manchester, England to study its mill system and memorized their construction. PROCESSING THE COTTON Cotton mills get the cotton shipped to them in large, 500 pound bales. When the cotton comes out of a bale, it is all packed together and still contains vegetable matter. In order to fluff up the cotton and remove the vegetable matter, the cotton is sent through a picker. A picker looks similar to the Carding machine and the Cotton Gin , but is slightly different. The cotton is fed into the machine and gets beaten with a beater bar, to loosen it up. The cotton then collects on a screen and gets fed through various rollers, which serve to remove the vegetable matter. The cotton comes off of the picking machine in large bats, and is then taken to carding machines. The carders line up the fibres nicely to make them easier to spin. The carding machine consists mainly of one big roller with smaller ones surrounding it. All of the rollers are covered in small teeth, and as the cotton progresses further on the teeth get finer (''i.e.'' closer together). The cotton leaves the carding machine in the form of a sliver; a large rope of fibres. Next, several slivers are combined. Each sliver will have thin and thick spots, and by combining several slivers together a more consistent size can be reached. Since combining several slivers produces a very thick rope of cotton fibres, directly after being combined the slivers are separated into rovings. These rovings are then what are used in the spinning process. Generally speaking, for machine processing a roving is about the width of a pencil. The spinning machines take the roving, thin it and twist it, creating Yarn . The roving is pulled off a Bobbin and fed through some rollers, which are feeding at several different speeds.This thins the roving at a consistent rate. If the roving was not a consistent size, then this step could cause a break in the yarn, or could jam the Machine . The yarn is twisted through the spinning of the bobbin it is rolled on, exactly like a Spinning Wheel but just in a different configuration. Plying is done by pulling Yarn from two or more Bobbin s and twisting it together, in the opposite direction that that in which it was spun. Depending on the weight desired, cotton may or may not have been plied. After being spun and plied, the cotton thread is taken to a Warp ing room where racks of bobbins are set up to hold the thread while it is rolled onto the warp bar of a Loom . Because the thread is fine, often three of these would be combined to get the desired Thread Count . When cotton mills first came into being, the next step would be to manually thread the Warp through the heddles. Later on, a machine was invented for tying the new warp onto the old warp. This saves time, but means that the cloth will have the same pattern as the previous warp. If a new pattern is wanted, the warp still has to be threaded through the heddles. At this point, the thread is woven. Depending on the era, one person could manage anywhere from 3 to 100 machines. As time progressed new mechanisms were added that stopped the loom any time something went wrong. The mechanisms check for such things as a broken warp thread, broken Weft thread, the shuttle going straight across, and they check to see if the shuttle is empty. SEE ALSO Textile Manufacturing |
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