Cotton-spinning machinery
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Cotton-spinning machinery refers to machines which process (or spin) raw cotton into workable yarn or thread. Such machinery can be dated back centuries. During the 18th and 19th centuries, as part of the Industrial Revolution cotton-spinning machinery was developed to bring mass production to the cotton industry. Cotton spinning machinery was installed in large factories, commonly known as cotton mills.
In 1738 Lewis Paul and John Wyatt of Birmingham patented the Roller Spinning machine and the flyer-and-bobbin system, for drawing cotton to a more even thickness, using two sets of rollers that travelled at different speeds. Perfected by Thomas Highs of Leigh, stolen by Richard Arkwright, this principle was the basis of Arkwright's later water frame design. By 1742 Paul and Wyatt had opened a mill in Birmingham which used their new rolling machine powered by the humble Donkey, this was not profitable and soon closed. A factory was opened in Northampton in 1743, with fifty spindles turning on five of Paul and Wyatt's machines, proving more successful than their first mill; this operated until 1764.
Lewis Paul invented the hand-driven carding machine in 1748. A coat of wire slips were placed around a card, which was then wrapped around a cylinder. Lewis' invention was later developed and improved by Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton, although the design came under suspicion after a fire at Daniel Bourn's factory in Leominster which used Paul and Wyatt's spindles. Bourn produced a similar patent in the same year.
Rev John Dyer of Northampton recognised the importance of the Paul and Wyatt cotton spinning machine in a poem in1757:
- "A circular machine, of new design
- In conic shape: it draws and spins a thread
- Without the tedious toil of needless hands.
- A wheel invisible, beneath the floor,
- To ev'ry member of th' harmonius frame,
- Gives necessary motion. One intent
- O'erlooks the work; the carded wool, he says,
- So smoothly lapped around those cylinders,
- Which gently turning, yield it to yon cirue
- Of upright spindles, which with rapid whirl
- Spin out in long extenet an even twine."
The Platt Brothers, based in Oldham, England were amongst the most prominent machine makers in this field of work.
Eventually the hand mule became a machine in which most of the work was done automatically; the spinner being chiefly required, to regulate the velocity of the backing off, and the inward run of the carriage, and to actuate the fallers. As a result of these alterations the machine was made almost double the length of Kellys. In this state many mules continued to be used until the last decade of the 19th century.
Between the years 1824 and 1830 Richard Roberts invented a mechanism that rendered all parts of the mule self-acting, regulating the rotation of the spindles during the inward run of the carriage.
At first his machine was only used to spin coarse and low-to-medium counts, but it is now employed to spin all counts of yarn. Although numerous changes have since been made in the self-acting mule, the machine still bears indelible marks of the genius of Roberts.
For many purposes, the threads as spun by the ring frame or the mule are ready for the manufacturer; but where extra strength or smoothness is required, as in threads for sewing, crocheting, hosiery, lace and carpets; also where multicoloured effects are needed, as in Grandrelle, or some special form of irregularity, as in corkscrewed, and knopped yarns, two or more single threads are compounded and twisted together. This operation is known as "doubling".
In order to prepare threads for doubling, it may be necessary to wind them side by side upon a flanged bobbin, or upon a straight or tapering spool, from two to six threads before twisting them into one.
Winding machines for this purpose are of various kinds. There are those in which the threads are laid evenly between the flanges of a bobbin, and those that coil the threads upon a straight or a tapering tube to form "cheeses". In the latter the tubes may be laid upon diagonally split drums and rotated by frictional contact.
By placing each group of threads to be wound in the slit of a rotating drum, it is drawn quickly to and fro and coiled upon a spool. If solid instead of split drums are used, the guides for all the threads on one side of a machine are attached to a bar, which is traversed by a cam placed at one end of the frame. Otherwise, an independent mechanism may be provided throughout for treating each group of threads to be wound.
The bobbins or tubes may be filled from "cops", "ring spools" or "hanks", but a stop motion is required for each thread, which will come into operation immediately a fracture occurs.
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