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 Book. 
 
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The Story of Textiles 
 
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 The Exhibition 
 
 This handbook was pubHshed by the 
 Newark Museum Association during the 
 Exhibition of New Jersey Textiles held in 
 the Public Library Building Feb. 1 to 
 March 18, 1916, for the use of students 
 and teachers. 
 
 The exhibition consisted of exhibits of 
 clothmaking, hatmaking, knitting, em- 
 broidery and lace, rugmaking; modern arts 
 and crafts and the handwork of the schools; 
 an historic exhibit of old New Jersey-made 
 textiles and the Homelands Exhibit, articles 
 contributed by school children of foreign 
 parentage. Also 66 firms contributed com- 
 mercial exhibits and 32 schools and 10 
 clubs were represented. 
 
 Demonstrations of spinning with distafif 
 and spindle and wheels, and of weaving on 
 colonial, modern arid tapestry looms were 
 held daily during the exhibition. 
 
iiaeeciatlon 
 
 APR 23 taw 
 

 The Story of Textiles 
 
 Early Weaving 
 
 When savage women first began to look 
 about them for means of making their lives 
 more comfortable, they plaited, twisted and 
 tied limber vines and twigs and grasses — 
 whatever they could find — and out of these 
 made houses, furniture and clothing. Thus 
 in diflferent parts of the world, savages 
 made the same inventions. 
 
 For instance, there is the round house. 
 You stick several young saplings into the 
 
 Fig. 1 . Framework of a round house. 
 
 ground, to form a circle, or you use saplings 
 growing from the ground. You tie their 
 tops together, and weave in and out around 
 these uprights small boughs, long grass, 
 rushes, or whatever is handy and limber 
 enough for your use (Fig. 1). 
 
 Or, put on grasses like a thatch, hold 
 them down by sticks across them (Fig. 2) 
 and tie these sticks by twining them. Mud 
 
 Wattling. 
 
 and clay added to such twined work 
 make a "wattle and daub" hut (Fig. 3). 
 Many varieties of these houses are made 
 by the American Indians and the char- 
 
 coal burners of England make round 
 huts of "a number of thin poles, laid to- 
 gether in the form of a cone; — interlaced 
 with brushwood, covered with sod, laid 
 
 Fig. 3. Covered round house. 
 
 grass side in." Matting also is woven for 
 floor coverings (Fig. 4). And the roots, 
 stems, bark and leaves of many plants 
 
 Fig. 4. Matting made of sugar cane bark by Indians. 
 
 furnish materials for baskets to hold food 
 (Fig. 5, Fig. 6) for clothing, for armor, 
 for furniture and for transportation (Fig. 7). 
 The wealth of an Indian family was 
 counted in the number and beauty of its 
 baskets, and that baskets enter into religion 
 is shown by the basket dances of the Hopi 
 Indians. Woven traps also for catching 
 animals and fish are common among 
 savages. And among our unsettled Indian 
 tribes water jars were woven before pottery 
 was used. 
 
 Early Spinning 
 It may have been thousands of years 
 after the beginning of basket weaving that 
 the art of spinning was invented. In 
 
Newark Museum Association 
 
 spinning, a long continuous thread is made 
 by twisting a number of single strands, even 
 quite short ones, together so that the end 
 of each is lost in the twisting of several. 
 
 Fig. 5. Rushes bent to make basket. 
 
 We do not know how spinning first came 
 to be practised. Strands of wool torn off 
 the backs of sheep by bushes may have 
 suggested to people already used to weaving 
 that this material also might be woven. 
 It was easy to make a long thread by draw- 
 ing out and twisting the natural wool. 
 Wool and flax seem to have been the 
 earliest materials used in spinning. Early 
 
 Fig. 7. Indian shoe. i 
 
 From Report of U. S. National Museum, 1902 
 
 spinning was probably done as in Fig. lO.j 
 
 A bunch of fibres was held under the 
 
 left arm. After awhile this bunch was 
 
 wound on a stick called a distaff. A weight 
 
 <^f 
 
 Fig. 6. Wicker basket. 
 
 Fig. 8. Distaff and 
 spindle. 
 
 Fig. 9. The rock. 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 was fastened to one end of this bunch of 
 fibres. The spinner drew out the strand 
 to which the weight was attached, and gave 
 it a twist. The weight fell slowly, and 
 turned, thus drawing and at the same time 
 
 Fig. 10. Spinning by distaff and spindle, 
 twisting the strand. When it reached the 
 ground, the spinner picked it up, wound 
 the spun yarn on it, made it fast, and did 
 the same thing again. When for the 
 weight a stone with a hole in it was used 
 and a stick was stuck through the hole, 
 that was the invention of the spindle 
 (Fig. 8). In Germany the distafif was 
 called a rock, and stood upright (Fig. 9) 
 while the spinner sat or stood near it, 
 pulling out and twisting the yarn as she 
 dropped the spindle, picking it up again 
 and winding on it the spun yarn. This 
 makes of spinning, not a continuous, but 
 ,an intermittent motion. 
 \ These three motions^ — drawing, twisting 
 and winding — are carried on wherever 
 
 spinning is done, whether by savage women 
 or by modern spinning machines. 
 
 Very early in India, but in Europe about 
 a hundred years before the days of Co- 
 lumbus, spinners began to use a wheel. 
 
 Carding 
 
 As soon as spinning began, the woman 
 began to prepare the little threads or 
 fibres by loosening them, when they were 
 wadded together, and by laying them 
 straight. This led to carding (Fig. 11, 
 Fig. 12). 
 
 The first cards were the fingers, then, 
 perhaps, thorns, and later, wires, set like 
 teeth, in a fiat piece of wood. All through 
 the history of the use of fibres, improve- 
 ments in carding have been made to keep 
 
 Fig. 11. Carding. 
 
 pace with improvements in spinning, since 
 the spinning depends on the carding. 
 
 Improvements in Spinning 
 To use the great or Jersey wheel (Fig. 13) , 
 the worker held the roll of carded fibre on a 
 distafT, or placed it in a pile close to the 
 wheel. She fastened one end of this roll to 
 the spindle. She held the unspun yarn in 
 her left hand, and with a small stick struck 
 the spokes of the wheel. This made the 
 wheel revolve and that turned the spindle. 
 
Newark Museum Association 
 
 She drew the strand away from the turning 
 spindle, and thus the yarn was drawn by the 
 movement of her hand and twisted by the 
 turning of the spindle. Then she stopped 
 
 Fig. 12. Two cards and a carded roll. 
 
 the wheel, and turned it the other way, 
 meanwhile holding the strand she had spun 
 at right angles to the spindle. This wound 
 the finished yarn on the spindle. Thus, 
 
 Fig. 13. The Great, or Jersej-, wheel. 
 
 when she was drawing, the spindle was 
 really a spindle. Its work was to twist. 
 But when the drawing was finished, the 
 spindle became a spool. Its work then was 
 merely to wind. This operation, also, was 
 intermittent. 
 
 By the distaff and spindle each strand 
 spun was as long as from the height of 
 the distaff to the ground; in using the 
 Jersey wheel, the spinner stepped away 
 while the drawing and twisting was going 
 on, and back when she wound the yarn. 
 The strand spun at each movement depended 
 for its length on this backward and forward 
 step. In our colonial days, a spinner at her 
 wheel sometimes walked 20 miles a day. 
 
 About 50 years after the invention of 
 printing and the discovery of America, a 
 German invented what is called the Saxony 
 wheel (Fig. 14). In this wheel the spindle 
 has two new attachments — a flyer, and a 
 bobbin (Fig. 15). 
 
 The horseshoe-shaped flyer goes around 
 faster than the spool-shaped bobbin and 
 serves several purposes: The turning of 
 the flyer, which is more rapid than that of 
 the bobbin, twists the thread, and winds it 
 on the bobbin, and the worker by moving 
 the thread from one of the flyer teeth to the 
 other can cause the thread to be wound 
 evenly along the whole length of the bobbin. 
 The Saxony wheel is run by a treadle, so 
 that the spinner has both hands free. 
 With her left hand she pulls the wool down 
 from the distaff and keeps piecing it on, and 
 
 Fig. 14. The Saxony wheel. 
 
 with the right she feeds the spindle with a 
 continuous strand, while with her foot she 
 keeps the wheel going. This makes spinning 
 a continuous, instead of an intermittent 
 motion, for the drawing, the twisting and 
 the winding are all done at once. 
 
 By this Saxony wheel, the machine did 
 the twisting and winding, but a woman was 
 necessary to do the drawing, so that the 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 amount spun depended still on the number 
 of skilled spinners at work. 
 
 Now by the period just before the 
 American Revolution, great inventions were 
 made in weaving, and therefore much 
 thread was needed. The problems were: 
 To find a way to draw out the fibres by 
 machinery; to keep a number of spindles 
 going at once. 
 
 John Wyatt, an Englishman, was the 
 first to invent a method of drawing, without 
 the use of fingers. He drew by the use of 
 rollers. The first two rollers between which 
 the strand passed, as between the rollers of 
 a clothes wringer, turned slowly, but the 
 two rollers ahead moved more quickly. 
 So the strand was drawn out to make a 
 finer strand with the fibres more parallel. 
 
 James Hargreaves, another Englishman, 
 invented a machine called a spinning jenny 
 which fed a number of strands to a number 
 of spindles, and worked intermittently, 
 like the great wheel. 
 
 He pulled a carriage that slid back and 
 forth on a framework away from the spindles 
 with one hand, thus drawing the strand, 
 and he turned a wheel with the other hand, 
 thus turning the spindles, and twisting the 
 thread. Then he stopped his wheel, and 
 as he pushed the carriage back, the spun 
 yarn was wound on to the spindles. The 
 hand spinners were furious and persecuted 
 him for taking away their work. 
 
 A few years after this, Richard Ark- 
 wright, an English barber, invented a 
 spinning machine with continuous motion, 
 like that of the Saxony wheel. 
 
 He ran several spindles, each with a 
 flier, to twist the strands into threads, 
 and to wind the yarn thus made on bobbins. 
 He used also the drawing rollers of Wyatt. 
 Arkwright was made a knight for his work. 
 As his machine was heavy to run, horses 
 and later water power were used. 
 
 Then an English textile worker named 
 Crompton united the ideas of Hargreave 
 and Arkwright and made what was called 
 a "mule," because a mule is a cross between 
 a donkey and a horse. He put drawing 
 rollers in place of Hargreave's spindles. 
 
 Fig. 15. The flyer, attached to the spindle. 
 
 with the roving, or unspun material behind 
 them, and he set his spindles on his movable 
 carriage. His machine was, then, inter- 
 mittent. This invention of the mule was 
 made in 1779. 
 
 Improvements In Carding 
 Meanwhile, carding also had improved. 
 The problems of the inventors of carding 
 machines were: To accomplish the work 
 of the cards without hands, and at increased 
 speed; to make a continuous sliver instead 
 of short pieces ; to waste as little as possible ; 
 to injure the fibres as little as possible. 
 They did not succeed, however, in this last. 
 Carding machines hurt the fibres more 
 than hand cards do. 
 
 Lewis Paul, an Englishman, discovered, 
 in 1748, that revolving cyhnders, set with 
 wires, would card. That is the principle of 
 modern carding. For a quarter of a century 
 the fibre was fed by hand to the machines. 
 Then John Lees, of Manchester, invented an 
 apron feed. All that time, the slivers that 
 came from the carders were in short pieces. 
 Arkwright fed the fibre in a wide lap to the 
 carder which passed it out into a funnel, 
 that contracted it into a sliver. And he 
 added a stripper that removed this sliver. 
 So, by the time Crompton's mule was 
 invented, modern carding principles were 
 in use: Continuous feed, continuous card- 
 ing, continuous removal. 
 
 The wheel and the band both have teeth, 
 and they act like the two cards of the hand 
 carder. A large roll of partly cleaned cotton 
 placed in front of the machine is carded 
 and delivered in the shape of a clean ribbon 
 
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 Newark Museum Association 
 
 into a can. Meanwhile, the poor fibre is 
 carried away to be made into cheap cloth, 
 and the impurities drop through into a box. 
 
 Modern Spinning Machines 
 
 Modern spinning frames are more com- 
 plicated than the old, but the machines are 
 based on the same principles. A modern 
 mule gives intermittent action, and the flyer 
 frame gives continuous motion, just as the 
 old hand machines did. The difference is in 
 multiplication of parts and rapidity of 
 motion. 
 
 Early Weaving 
 
 Not all thread has been spun in order to 
 be woven. Thread may be twisted into 
 cord or rope; it may be netted, or knobbed, 
 or knitted. It may be guided by needles, 
 or hooks, or bobbins, to make embroidery, 
 or lace, or tatting. But just as carding 
 methods were improved to keep pace with 
 processes of spinning, so new spinning 
 methods were invented to keep up with 
 the demands of the weavers. 
 
 The first weaving was probably done with- 
 out looms, but among many peoples the 
 loom was early invented. The Chinese, 
 the Hindoos, the Indians of America, the 
 Egyptians, all invented looms of various 
 sorts. For when the early people found 
 that they could make strands of any length 
 they so fastened one set of threads, which 
 
 we call warp thread, as to keep them taut. 
 Then they could put in the crosswise 
 threads, that we call woof, or weft, or 
 filling, more easily, and so make long pieces 
 of firmly woven goods. 
 
 One of the early looms consisted of two 
 horizontal beams, parallel to each other, 
 and some distance apart, fastened cross- 
 wise between two upright sticks. From 
 one of these cross beams to the other the 
 warp threads were stretched. The warp 
 threads were wound on the upper of these 
 horizontal beams, which is therefore called 
 the warp beam. The cloth as it was woven 
 was wound around the lower, which is called 
 the cloth beam. The worker sat in front of 
 the cloth beam, which sometimes hung 
 so low that he had to dig a hole for his feet. 
 
 Another early loom consisted merely of a 
 beam hung by the warp from the limb of a 
 tree (Fig. 16). On this the worker wove 
 from the bottom up. Penelope's loom was 
 upright, but she wove from the top down. 
 Some Indian looms were horizontal (Fig. 17). 
 
 Improvements In Looms 
 The European hand loom, which was 
 also the loom used by the American colonists, 
 was a frame with beams horizontally 
 parallel, so that the warp threads were 
 horizontal. The weaver sat or stood at 
 one end, and drew the woven goods towards 
 him as he wove (Fig. 18). 
 
 Fig. 16. A Navajo loom. 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 Fig. 17. Pueblo woman weaving. 
 
 Heddles 
 
 Weaving may be done with a needle, 
 run in and out among the stationary 
 threads. But soon the alternate taut 
 threads of the warp were parted, every 
 other thread lowered or raised, that the 
 thread fastened to a needle or shuttle might 
 go back and forth between them, carrying 
 the weft thread. The opening through 
 which the shuttle passes is called the shed. 
 At first the threads were raised by the 
 fingers to make this shed, then by tying 
 the odd threads to one stick as long as the 
 width of the loom and the even threads to 
 another, and moving these sticks alternately. 
 The Zuni Indians used for this a heddle. 
 It consists of strings or wires, or cross 
 pieces, strung across a frame just the width 
 of the loom (Fig. 19). 
 
 In the middle of each heddle string there 
 is a hole or loop. Through the loops of one 
 heddle all the odd warp threads may be 
 passed, and through the loops of another 
 heddle all the even warpthreads. 
 
 By moving the heddles the shed is made 
 and through the shed the shuttle is thrown 
 (Fig. 20). 
 
 The heddles are fastened to a harness 
 above the loom by straps, controlled by 
 pulleys. These pulleys are worked by the 
 weaver's feet. The weaver pushes down a 
 treadle, the harness pulls up a heddle, thii 
 raises a set of threads, this makes the shed, 
 and through the shed the shuttle is thrown. 
 Then another treadle is pressed, another 
 heddle raised, and another shed made. 
 
 Reeds 
 
 After the shuttle has been sent through 
 the shed, the new cross thread must be 
 pushed tight against the last one, to make 
 the weave firm and even. At first this was 
 done with a small piece of wood called a 
 batten, and the pushing up of the weft 
 thread is still called battening. Then the 
 reed was invented. 
 
 It is like a heddle with no holes. When 
 the weaver has passed a thread through the 
 
 Fig. 18. Colonial hand loom. 
 
10 
 
 Newark Museum Association 
 
 Fig. 19. A heddle. 
 
 Fig. 20. Throwing the shuttle through the shed. 
 
 shed, she draws the reed toward her and 
 beats the new thread against the already 
 woven cloth. 
 
 The Draw Loom 
 
 The early hand looms could make plain 
 goods, and some simple figures, but compli- 
 cated patterns demanded more heddles and 
 treadles than one worker could manage. 
 The Crusaders brought back, the Draw 
 Loom from Damascus, the term damask 
 being applied to the elaborately designed 
 linen made in that city. In the Draw 
 Loom, the shed was controlled by cords 
 pulled by an assistant to the weaver called 
 the "draw boy." Later an automatic 
 attachment took the place of the draw boy. 
 
 Shuttles 
 
 The invention of automatic spinning in 
 England gave an impetus to weaving. In 
 1733 John Kay invented the fly shuttle 
 (Fig. 21). He placed a box at each end to 
 receive the shuttle. Each box had a driver 
 which threw the shuttle through the shed. 
 The box at the other end caught it. The 
 weaver moved the driver by moving a 
 handle, which caused the driver to give a 
 sharp blow to the shuttle. This increased 
 the amount woven threefold. 
 
 It was still, however, necessary to stop 
 the loom every time a new color was 
 needed, in order to change the shuttle. 
 John Kay's son, Robert Kay, invented the 
 drop box. He placed several shuttle boxes 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 11 
 
 at each end, each holding a bobbin of a 
 different color, and these boxes fell into 
 place automatically. 
 
 Steam Power 
 
 By the time all these inventions in 
 carding, spinning and weaving had been 
 made, these industries had left their cottage 
 homes, and factory work had begun, the 
 hands gathering together in one place to 
 tend the machines which did the work. 
 So, as women had ceased to make their 
 own cloth, large demands were made on 
 the factories. To make the output larger, 
 man power gave way to horse, mule and 
 water power. 
 
 Just at this time James Watt, a Scottish 
 engineer, patented improvements on the 
 steam engine which changed it from a slow- 
 moving expensive steam pump used only 
 to pump water from the mines. His 
 inventions made it economical, and adapted 
 for driving machinery of all kinds. And 
 
 and hand looms, but by the application of 
 power through mechanical contrivances, 
 such as wheels, cogs, belts, pulleys, levers, 
 gears, springs and chains, a few people can 
 accomplish great results. One girl can now 
 spin as much in a day as would take twelve 
 hundred girls at the wheel. In 1830 Roberts 
 invented a power loom. And today, in a 
 modern loom, the cloth is wound up, the 
 warp let out, empty bobbins are replaced, 
 shuttles fly, and the loom stops when the 
 thread breaks. Modern inventions are 
 devoted only to making the loom work 
 faster and more smoothly. 
 
 The Jacquard Loom 
 
 One of the most interesting looms is the 
 Jacquard loom, invented by a French 
 hat maker. 
 
 It weaves any variety of pattern, by the 
 use of perforated cards (Fig. 22). 
 
 The warp threads pass through loops 
 (Fig. 23) C, in cords, which are lifted by 
 means of hooks, at E. These hooks go 
 
 Fig. 21. The fly shuttle. 
 
 thus great textile mills could use the labor- 
 saving machines which had meanwhile 
 been invented. 
 
 In modern factories, the same principles 
 are used as in the early spinning wheels 
 
 Fig. 22. Card of Jacquard loom. 
 
 through eyes, H, in needles, F, and the 
 needles, F, are pushed to the left by springs, 
 G, against the surface of cards which lie 
 one by one vertically against the right side 
 of the revolving cylinder, I. When a card 
 comes into place, at the side of the cylinder, 
 the needles are pushed against it. Every 
 needle whose point goes through a hole in 
 the card holds its hook over the hook lifter 
 at E, so that the cord that hangs from that 
 hook keeps the warp thread that passes 
 through its loop at C raised. But every 
 needle whose left end finds no hole, hits the 
 
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 Newark Museum Association 
 
 surface of the card instead of going through, 
 and gets pushed back towards G. Then 
 the hook that passes through its eye, F, 
 gets pushed off of the hook Hft at E, and 
 as the hft rises of course the cord attached 
 to that hook does not rise. And the weight, 
 D, attached at the bottom, pulls it down, 
 so that the warp thread that runs through 
 its loop, C, is lower than the warp thread 
 that runs through the loops that rose. Thus 
 the shed is made. A Jacquard loom may 
 have 400 needles and the number of patterns 
 that can be made on it is uncounted. 
 Moreover, the cards go around in regular 
 
 order, so that the pattern repeats itself as 
 often as necessary. 
 
 Knitting 
 
 Not only are threads, after spinning, 
 woven by machines but various other hand 
 processes also have been successfully imi- 
 tated by machinery. Knitting machines 
 are used more and more each year. In 
 knitting, the fabric is made by looping each 
 line of thread into the one before it. The 
 latch needle (Fig. 24) does this looping 
 in many machines. Circular knitting ma- 
 chines make stockings, sweaters, etc., and 
 
 p '• ♦ I 
 
 Fig. 23. Scheme of Jacquard loom. 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 13 
 
 stitches may be dropped or taken up auto- 
 matically to shape them. But steaming and 
 shrinking also are used for shaping. Many 
 garments which pass for woven have a 
 knitted background, through which soft 
 yarns pass making a napped or fuzzy 
 surface on one side, as in eiderdown flannel. 
 
 The Fibres 
 
 The materials which have been selected 
 by mankind for spinning and weaving are 
 from several very different sources. 
 
 The sheep, goat, alpaca, camel, or other 
 animal has growing from its outer skin 
 long, slender, often curly hairs, and shorter, 
 finer hairs, called wool, made of cells and 
 covered with scales. These scales (Fig. 
 25) cause wool fibres to cling together, and 
 make possible the felting process. Thus 
 hats are made by massing quantities of 
 hairs, helter-skelter, in the form of a 
 sheet on a big mold, wetting them, and 
 shrinking them. The scales expand when 
 moist, and shrinking when dry, hold together 
 in the form of a stiff cloth. Woven and 
 knitted goods of wool, also, are shrunken, 
 so that besides the hold of their crossed 
 and looped threads there may be the hold 
 of scale on scale to make the cloth compact. 
 
 Silk has no cells. It is a long smooth, 
 cylindrical fibre, made by the union of two 
 streams of gummy fluid that issue from 
 the worm, unite, and dry (Fig. 26). Its 
 length makes it easy to spin, and its length 
 and smoothness make it glossy. But the 
 gummy particles that adhere to it are hard 
 to get off without weakening the fibres. 
 
 Cotton fibres are one-celled hairs growing 
 from the outer skin of the cotton seed. 
 A cotton fibre looks like a smooth flat band 
 with thickened edges (Fig. 27). It is 
 twisted at intervals, and although each 
 fibre is only from less than an inch to two 
 inches long, this twist makes it easy to 
 spin, for the fibres cling together readily, and 
 are quite elastic. 
 
 The fibres spun to make linen are the 
 long bast fibres that are under the outer 
 layer of bark in the flax stalk. A fibre may 
 be a yard long, and is made of a number of 
 
 =fe 
 
 Fig. 24. Latch needle from knitting machine. 
 
 cells. The fibre is cylindrical (Fig. 28) 
 and has every now and then a hump like 
 the joint of a bamboo. 
 
 These are the chief fibres spun and woven, 
 but there are others each of wl .ich has been 
 used either in some part of the world where 
 it is easily obtained, or as a substitute or 
 adulteration of more expensive fibres in 
 modern manufacture. Ramie is obtained 
 from a nettle; China grass is much like it. 
 They are silky, but stiff and inelastic. 
 Jute is a bast fibre found in India. It is 
 long, and soft, but weak. Hemp is derived 
 from many plants and resembles flax. It is 
 used for rope and cord. Pineapple fibre 
 is taken from the leaves of the pineapple 
 plant. It makes the Pina cloth of the 
 Philippines. Coir is obtained from the shell 
 of the cocoanut. 
 
 By the use of the microscope, a student 
 can tell what fibres have been used in 
 making a cloth, in what amounts, and how 
 they have been combined. 
 
 Silk 
 
 There are, in the silk raising countries, 
 persons especially engaged in raising the 
 worms. They save the best cocoons for 
 their eggs. 
 
 The female moth breaks open the cocoon 
 where she has lain wrapped in silken threads 
 (Fig. 29, 30) , and lays several hundred eggs 
 on sheets of muslin or paper provided her 
 for that purpose, and in a few days she 
 dies. The sheets are placed in cold storage 
 for several months. Then the eggs are 
 hatched by heat. 
 
 For about 50 days the worms are fed 
 the leaves of the white mulberry tree 
 (Fig. 31). The condition of the leaves 
 affects the silk. Even the soil in which 
 the trees are planted is important. 
 
14 
 
 Newark Museum Association 
 
 Fig. 25. Wool and hair fibres enlarged. 
 
 Fig. 26. Silk fibre 
 with gun particles. 
 
 While eating and growing the worm 
 changes its skin four times (Fig. 32) . After 
 the fourth moult, the worm spins its cocoon. 
 The spinning glands are full of transparent 
 liquid, which theworm forces, in two delicate 
 threads, from two openings underneath 
 the mouth. These threads become one 
 as they issue and harden as the air touches 
 them (Fig. 33). In them the worm winds 
 itself. As the liquid becomes exhausted 
 the worm wastes away and changes to a 
 chrysalis. This chrysalis, if left to itself, 
 would become a moth in fifteen or twenty 
 days, and eat its way through the end of 
 the cocoon, thus breaking the fibres. The 
 cocoon, therefore, is heated to kill the 
 chrysalis within, soon after the spinning is 
 finished. 
 
 The cocoons are then sent to the reeling 
 establishments. Here a reeler places several 
 of them in a basin of boiling water. The 
 reels are run by hand or power. The loose 
 silk is removed from the outside of the co- 
 coon and laid aside, with defective cocoons, 
 to be used for spun silk. With a revolving 
 brush the reeler catches the ends of the 
 threads on several cocoons, takes them with 
 his fingers and draws them from the cocoons 
 until they begin to run smoothly. All 
 
 the threads from the cocoons in one basin 
 of water are now united, twisted lightly in 
 the fingers, threaded through an eye of 
 glass or agate, fastened to the reel and 
 wound upon it in the shape of a hank or 
 skein (Fig. 34). The reeled silk in skein 
 form is usually shipped to countries which 
 manufacture silk goods. 
 
 The raw silk is made into yarn for 
 weaving by a series of processes called 
 throwing. The throwster winds the skeins 
 of silk upon bobbins, piecing all bad places 
 and removing all irregularities. 
 
 The silk thus wound usually needs to be 
 doubled and twisted to give it enough 
 strength for boiling and dyeing. Singles 
 are the original threads as reeled off from 
 a basin of cocoons, and are used for special 
 kinds of very fine, thin goods (Fig. 35). 
 Quite strong threads are made by twisting 
 together these singles, which have already 
 been themselves tightly twisted. These 
 threads are used chiefly for warp threads in 
 weaving. vSofter crosswise threads also are 
 made by uniting two or more imtwisted 
 threads, with a slight twisting. 
 
 Before weaving, the thrown silk is boiled 
 to remove the gum. This process makes the 
 silk lighter in weight. It is next usually 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 15 
 
 weighted. For this purpose the skeins are 
 dipped in salts of tin or iron, of which the 
 silk takes to itself a certain part. On the 
 whole, weighting weakens the fibre, and the 
 chemical effects which follow may destroy 
 the silk or ruin its color. 
 
 Silk is dyed in the yarn or in the piece. 
 If the yarn is dyed, the skeins are then 
 wound off on bobbins ready for the loom. 
 
 Embroidery silk and sewing silk are made 
 by giving special twists to varied numbers 
 
 Cotton 
 
 The cotton plant grows from four to six 
 feet high (Fig. 36) and after blooming is 
 covered with brown pods called bolls (Fig. 
 37, 38), which burst open when ripe, showing 
 the cotton inside. Cotton is picked by 
 pulling the fibre from the boll and it is 
 necessary to have this part of the process 
 done by hand as judgment has to be used as 
 to whether the cotton is ripe. If a bit of 
 
 Fig. 27. Cotton fibres enlarged. 
 
 Fig. 28. Flax fibres enlarged. 
 
 of threads according to size required. The 
 thread obtained from this process is again 
 united with other threads of the same kind, 
 and given the reverse twist. 
 
 Spun silk is made from the short ends 
 and waste of reeled silk and from defective 
 cocoons, which do not yield the long thread. 
 It is spun as are other fibres, but it has not 
 the strength of reeled silk. 
 
 There are several kinds of artificial silk. 
 Most of it is made from a preparation of 
 cellulose so treated as to produce thin 
 threads of great lustre and beauty. Such 
 silk, however, usually lacks the strength of 
 real silk and some kinds go to pieces when 
 wet. 
 
 ■I^HHH 
 
 ^^^^^m^^^^^^i 
 
 ^^^^1 
 
 ^^^^^H^^'^^f-^ ^^1 
 
 IPV^H 
 
 ^^r ' m 
 
 ^^ *^i|H 
 
 ^^^^^K^ yH 
 
 
 B. J 
 
 ^:..:. „ 
 
 JHHI^^I 
 
 Fig. 29. Moths emerging from Corticelli cocoons 
 Copyright, 1911, Nonotuck SUk Co. 
 
 unripe cotton gets into the mass it will 
 neither spin nor dye properly. 
 
16 
 
 Newark Museum Association 
 
 The application of steam power to the 
 loom at the end of the eighteenth century 
 made it important for the weavers to get 
 more raw material, and at just that time 
 Kli Whitney, seeing how hampered the 
 cotton growers were by the difficulties of 
 removing the seed from the cotton by hand, 
 invented his cotton gin. Before that, cotton 
 could be cleaned at the rate of a pound a 
 day for each worker. Today a saw gin 
 cleans 4000 pounds a day. 
 
 Whitney's gin consisted of a drum with 
 wire teeth which rotated against a grate on 
 the other side of which was the cotton. 
 The teeth caught the fibre and pulled it 
 through the bars leaving the seed on the 
 other side. For long fibred cotton there has 
 since been invented a roller gin in which the 
 seeds are pushed off by two blades that 
 strike the cotton as it is drawn by the rollers. 
 
 The fluffy cotton is then pressed and 
 tied into a bundle, or bale. 
 
 Linen 
 
 Although flax fibres are hidden in the 
 stalk of a plant, and are difficult to separate, 
 yet flax seems to have been woven as early 
 as wool and earlier than either cotton or silk. 
 
 Flax is a plant, about two feet high (Fig. 
 39), grayish green in color. 
 
 Just before the plant is ripe, it is pulled 
 up by the roots, by hand, and dried on 
 the ground. It is combed with iron combs 
 to remove its seed and leaves. 
 
 Then the stalks are steeped in water to 
 loosen the outside bark and the inside pith 
 from the fibres between them. These 
 stalks are then broken (Fig. 40). In 
 breaking machines they are passed through 
 rollers and beaten with revolving wooden 
 blades to get away all the woody and pithy 
 particles. 
 
 The fibre which remains is combed or 
 hackled. It is drawn through iron combs. 
 
 C 
 
 Fig. 30. Female Corticelli moth. 
 Copyright. 1911, Nonotuck Silk Co. 
 
 At the mill, the cotton is cleaned, 
 smoothed and straightened by a series of 
 revolving cylinders with teeth. It is then 
 carded, and run through a tube which makes 
 it into a soft sliver. It is drawn and spun 
 by the processes that we know. In England 
 it has been the custom for men to spin the 
 cotton, using mostly mules, but in America 
 it is usually spun by girls at upright frames. 
 
 hig. il. coriicelli silkworm eating. 
 Copyright, 1911, Nonotuck Silk Co. 
 
 each finer than the last, until it is fine 
 enough to spin and then it is combed again 
 into a long thin sliver, which is drawn out 
 by machinery into a rove, fit for spinning. 
 Linen is made from the flax fibres ac- 
 cording to the general principles of spinning 
 and weaving, but no modern loom turns 
 out linen as fine as that of ancient Egypt. 
 Around one Eg>'ptian mummy was wrapped 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 17 
 
 ■ 
 
 1 
 
 ^«m 
 
 ■ 
 
 Ih^^'* alHffi^Sffi 
 
 jfc5.v , 
 
 v « " ■-«? 
 
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^1 
 
 mSki^^B^ 
 
 ,'''rj,' '■ . 
 
 ■\.,:^ 
 
 ^^^^^^^^B 
 
 USEh vfr ' ^i" 
 
 ir- 
 
 i' 
 
 *^>.9( 
 
 ■ 
 
 ■H 
 
 1^^ 
 
 
 [^H 
 
 I^^^B^ 
 
 't ">,,.,-. 
 
 VWr^ 
 
 ^^^^^H 
 
 ^^^^^■K^K^ -<^^"^k\ 
 
 
 
 ^^^^^^^^^■^H 
 
 ^■I^^N i. ;- 
 
 
 ,';J 
 
 I^^^H 
 
 ■l 
 
 itt 
 
 ^1 
 
 ^1 
 
 Fig. 32. Corticelli silkworms about 18 days old. 
 Copyright, 191 1, Nonotuck Silk Co. 
 
 Fig. 33. Completed Corticelli cocoon 
 
 Copyright, 1911, Nonotuck Silk Co. 
 
 cloth containing 540 warp threads to the 
 inch, while the best modern English linen 
 has 350. 
 
 Wool 
 
 When savage men instead of wearing the 
 pelts of animals spun and wove their wool 
 they began one of the world's great in- 
 dustries. 
 
 Wool may be pulled from the skins of 
 
 slaughtered sheep, but it is chiefly cut, 
 either by hand or machinery, from the 
 living animal. It is sent, then, in bags 
 to warehouses where buyers from the mills 
 examine and bid for it. 
 
 At the mill it is sorted into different 
 grades, or mixed by hand to form different 
 grades. The grease and dirt are washed 
 away by machines. Then it is sprinkled 
 with oil. 
 
 Fig. 34. Reeling silk. 
 
 Fig. 35. Threads made by twisting. 
 
li 
 
 Newark Museum Association 
 
 After this process the wool is treated 
 differently according to whether it is to be 
 made into woolen or worsted yarns. Woolen 
 yarn is usually made of the shorter fibres; 
 the object in its manufacture is to keep the 
 fibres crossed and intermingled and bring 
 as many ends to the outside of the thread as 
 possible, so that after the yarn has been 
 woven into goods, the intercrossed fibres 
 may be felted, that is, interlocked to make 
 a tight matted piece of goods. Worsted 
 yarn is made usually of the longer fibres. 
 
 
 Fig. 36. Cotton plait. 
 
 which go through many combing processes 
 to straighten the fibres and keep them 
 even and parallel. Worsted yarn cannot 
 easily be adulterated, but woolen yarn is 
 frequently adulterated both in the earlier 
 and later states. 
 
 Fig. 40. Flax brake. 
 
 Woolen 
 
 Burrs and vegetable 
 fibres are removed by a 
 chemical process called 
 carbonizing. An acid 
 and heat are applied. 
 This burns out the vege- 
 table fibres, but leaves 
 the wool. 
 
 Worsted 
 
 Burrs are removed by 
 a machine consisting of 
 rollers which so move 
 against each other as 
 to knock the burrs out. 
 The wool is delivered as 
 a soft sliver. 
 
 A B 
 
 Fig. 41. Slivers of wool and worsted 
 
 Both woolen and worsted then are combed 
 through toothed cvlinders. 
 
 ^ 
 
 Fig. 37. Cotton boll. 
 
 Fig. 38. Cotton boll, open. 
 
 Fig. 39. Flax Plant. 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 19 
 
 Peculiar carding ma- 
 chines are used consist- 
 ing of toothed cylinders 
 against which smaller 
 cylinders work. These 
 comb and open the wool 
 so as to intermix the 
 fibres and to bring the 
 ends to the outside. 
 
 Woolen yarn is spun 
 on the mule. But, be- 
 cause a fuzzy thread is 
 wanted, the rollers in the 
 wooden mule do no 
 drawing. All the draw- 
 ing is done by the reces- 
 sion of the carriage. 
 
 The most important 
 processes in the making 
 of woolen cloth come 
 after the weaving. Then 
 the polishing, felting and 
 shrinking are done. 
 
 In the slivers which 
 come from these pre- 
 parers are still some 
 short fibres. These are 
 now removed by the 
 comb. They are used 
 in the manufacture of 
 woolen yarn. 
 
 There are several 
 systems of spinning 
 worsted yarn. In all 
 of them the aim is to 
 get an even sliver with 
 parallel fibres. There- 
 fore there is in all much 
 skillful drawing by 
 rollers. 
 
 Worsted goods are 
 fine and smooth and 
 well adapted to showing 
 patterns. 
 
 Bleaching, Dyeing and Decorative 
 Weaving 
 By the very nature of weaving a pattern is 
 formed, which by its regularity is pleasing. 
 In the simplest weave, called the plain 
 weave (Fig. 42), even when warp and filling 
 are of the same material, the cris-crossed 
 
 Fig. 42. Plain weave. 
 
 threads reflect the light dififerently, with 
 restflts that are agreeable — giving the feeling 
 of texture. The earliest basket weavers, 
 noticing this, began to make variations of 
 it. A simple variation (Fig. 43), is the 
 basket weave. Another (Fig. 44), is the 
 
 poplin weave. In this either the warp or 
 the filling threads may be grouped. In 
 the twilled weave, diagonal effects are 
 made (Fig. 45), and in the satin weave 
 (Fig. 46), either warp or weft threads are 
 unbroken, for so long a space as to give an 
 appearance of smoothness. 
 
 The use of different colors makes any 
 weave more effective and gives opportunity 
 for the application of design. Basket 
 makers in many lands soon learned this. 
 
 They used at first grasses that when dried 
 were of varied colors and then they dis- 
 covered natural dyes. 
 
 The Algonquin Indians wove into their 
 hempen garments the feathers of the wild 
 
 Fig. 43. Basket weave. 
 
 turkey and the hairs of the moose. And 
 textile printing originated independently 
 in China, India, Chile and Mexico. 
 
 In order to take well the coloring matter 
 applied to them, fibres must be scoured to 
 remove the gums, waxes, oils and the like 
 that cling to them. And if they are to be 
 given light tints, they must also first be 
 bleached. 
 
 Fig. 44. Poplin weave. 
 
 Textiles may be made ornamental in 
 color by dyeing the yarns, using different 
 colors in the weave and making variations 
 in the weaving process; or by dyeing the 
 
20 
 
 Newark Museum Association 
 
 woven textile in the piece; or by printing 
 a colored design upon one surface of the 
 cloth; or by embroidery. 
 
 
 ^m 
 
 Fig. 45. Twilled weave. Fig. 46. Satin weave. 
 
 Fig. 47 shows how the two surfaces of a 
 cloth may be made of different colors, 
 and Fig. 48 shows how a plush may be 
 made by a double cloth process. 
 
 Fig. 47. How double cloth is woven. 
 
 The soft colors of oriental rugs are pro- 
 duced from natural sources. In Europe and 
 America, aniline dyes are used. A Persian 
 dyer, having the recipe for a certain color 
 as a family inheritance, will dye his skeins, 
 expose them to the sun, and use them when 
 of just the right tone. He tries not so 
 much to match as to blend his colors. 
 And his colors last — or if they fade, change 
 to another tone of the same color. Aniline 
 dyes, in fading, change their colors. 
 
 In the factories of western countries, 
 chemists are constantly engaged in experi- 
 menting and testing. The results are 
 accurate, but not individual. 
 
 In spite of the fact that manufacturers 
 are constantly copying historic ornamenta- 
 tions, there are many artists employed in 
 making designs for textiles, and the highest 
 prices are paid, not for the amount of 
 material in a piece of cloth, but for the 
 beauty of its design, the fineness of the 
 spinning and the skill with which it is 
 woven. 
 
 In the middle of the 19th century there 
 began in England, partly as a result of the 
 writings of Thomas Carlyle, who preached 
 the doctrine that it is the business of the 
 world to give to us all opportunity for 
 originality, what was called the arts and 
 crafts movement. It was a reaction against 
 the sameness of machine-made goods, and 
 in favor of the expression of individual 
 taste. An artist and poet, William Morris, 
 who made nets in his boyhood and stitched 
 embroideries in his manhood, revived the 
 old art of tapestry weaving and restored 
 long lost methods of dyeing. Many people 
 in America, also, took up the idea, and the 
 houses of the rich began to be decorated 
 with hand-woven tapestries made in the 
 studios of craftsmen artists, while art 
 rugs and art handwork are made in many 
 middle class homes, and pupils in the schools 
 are taught the principles of designing by 
 applying them to beautiful things for use 
 as clothing or house decorations. 
 
 Economics of Textiles 
 
 The practical values of knowing some- 
 thing about textiles are several. 
 
 A person buying textiles should suspect 
 material that seems to be too good for the 
 price asked for it. 
 
 A good way to test the wearing quality 
 of cloth is by pressing the thumbs together 
 and then pulling the material straight out, 
 first warp way and then filling way. If 
 it tears or frays either way, it lacks strength. 
 Double the material, and run a needle 
 along as if tucking, and pull the single 
 cloth on each side away from the needle 
 to see whether it will bear strain at seams. 
 
 Wool burns slowly, goes out quickly, 
 leaves a gummy substance, and burns with 
 a bad odor. vSilk behaves somewhat like 
 wool. Cotton burns quickly and is hard 
 to blow out. Linen burns somewhat like 
 cotton, but less quickly. 
 
 Linen, quickly torn, will leave straight 
 smooth threads along the edge, but cotton 
 will curl up. A good ear can hear the 
 differences in the materials when torn. 
 
 Raveling a sample and examining the 
 threads and the weave will show much to 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 21 
 
 Fig. 48. Phish weave. 
 
 the eye, and more through a magnifying 
 glass. Holding a sample to the light also 
 often shows imperfections of weave and 
 of thread. Linen is bought by weight, 
 and there is a standard number of threads 
 to the inch in each sort. 
 
 The tongue can often be used to discover 
 sizing and weighting, or the finger nails can 
 remove sizing. Silk, weighted with minerals, 
 left in a hot oven for an hour or more, will 
 be burned out, and the weighting will 
 remain. 
 
 Samples can be cut into halves, and one 
 half preserved while the other is wet, sprinkled, 
 exposed to damp, or to sunlight. 
 
 Glycerin makes linen transparent, but 
 not cotton. 
 
 In washing woolen cloth, the problem 
 is to felt, or shrink, the wool as little as 
 possible. Wool, expanded by heat and 
 then contracted by cold, felts. Alkalies 
 and rubbing felt wool. Very hot water 
 or too hot an iron will felt and stiffen wool. 
 
 Color changed by acids can often be 
 restored by touching the spots with an 
 alkali like weak ammonia. 
 
 Ammonia and borax, when weak, are 
 harmless in the laundry. Too much wash- 
 ing soda is injurious, but enough to make 
 the water soft is generally safe. 
 
 Textiles and History 
 
 Weaving had a high place in the minds of 
 the ancients. Isis was the goddess that 
 looked after it in Egypt, Minerva in Greece, 
 
 and Penelope in Rome. Queen Semiramis 
 invented it for the Assyrians. And many 
 American Indian tribes use baskets in 
 their religious ceremonies and represent 
 their sacred myths in the ornaments on 
 their baskets and rugs. The Chinese 
 Empress who gave her people silk more 
 than 4000 years ago, was deified. 
 
 Tales are told of ladies, in the olden 
 days, so industrious that they spun as they 
 rode their palfreys. But the weaver neces- 
 sarily stays in one place, and thus the 
 invention of weaving was one of the in- 
 fluences that led to the homekeeping of 
 women. Although the keeping of flocks, 
 which also weaving encouraged, helped to 
 make the whole tribe wander as their 
 flocks sought fresh pastures. 
 
 Textiles have influenced much the trade 
 of the world. The Chinese junk crept 
 southward along the coast of Asia, laden 
 with silk, and returned with the cottons of 
 India. Caravans crossed the desert with 
 the "woven wind" of the Hindoos; Persian 
 merchants brought to the western coast 
 their many-colored rugs; the Crusaders, 
 returning from the Holy Sepulchre, brought, 
 not only the goods of the East, but the ways 
 of their manufacture. 
 
 The weaving art traveled from the East 
 into Greece, Italy, Spain and Flanders, 
 and later into Germany, whose men did 
 their weaving in caves because they were 
 ashamed to be known as practising an art 
 of peace. 
 
22 
 
 Newark Museum Association 
 
 The Arabs introduced silk culture into 
 Italy, where the methods of manufacture 
 were kept secret for 300 years. 
 
 The English language contains many 
 reminders of spinning and weaving. When 
 every woman spun, there arose the word 
 "spinster" and the phrase, "on the distaff 
 side," for one's mother's family, as dis- 
 tinguished from the father's family, "on 
 the spear side." And all the Shepards, 
 Shurmans, Woolseys, Kempsters, Weavers, 
 Dyers, Webbs, Fullers and Bates know 
 what was the occupation of their ancestors. 
 
 The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 
 drove spinners and weavers into England, 
 and helped to lay the foundation of her 
 manufacturing and commercial supremacy. 
 America's rebellion against England was 
 largely caused by the orders forbidding 
 export of woven goods from the colonies, 
 or trade between the colonies, or even 
 from one part of a colony to another. 
 The War of 1812 was in part the result of 
 England's prohibiting the carrying of Ameri- 
 can products to continental ports. The 
 Civil War was largely the fruit of the belief 
 that cotton was king. 
 
 Men's ways of living have been changed 
 by their ways of making cloth. In England, 
 when weaving was done in cottages, there 
 were the conditions described in Silas 
 Marner. When one loom demanded the 
 work of many spinners, workers gathered 
 into villages and towns. American frontiers- 
 men could conquer the plains because they 
 took looms with them. The wool which 
 the sons raised the mothers carded, the 
 daughters spun, the wives wove. The 
 invention of power looms took the workers 
 from their homes into factories, and helped 
 bring about the present conditions of 
 separation between capital and labor. 
 
 Children have, from the first, been 
 employed in weaving and spinning. Edward 
 I sent his sons to school and set his daughters 
 to "wool-worke." In the late 17th century 
 it was proposed to have spinning schools 
 in England like those of Germany. Two 
 hundred girls, from six years upward, sat 
 and spun. The mistress sat in a pulpit 
 
 and tapped any idler with a long wand. 
 If the idling continued, the mistress rang 
 a bell for an attendant who whipped the 
 culprit. When, after Arkwright's invention, 
 the operations of spinning and weaving 
 were brought under one roof, children 
 were found to be more skillful than adults 
 in tying broken threads. Charlotte Bronte 
 in "Shirley" boasts for Moore, the mill 
 owner, that he never beat the children 
 who worked for him. The battle to get 
 children out of American mills is still being 
 waged. 
 
 Textiles and Romance 
 
 Even the history of the fibres is full of 
 interesting incidents and strange myths. 
 For 1500 years after oriental silk goods were 
 known in Europe it was believed that silk 
 was a woolly substance spun from the 
 leaves of trees. There is one story of two 
 Chinese girls lured into Japan to teach the 
 art of silk weaving, another of a Chinese 
 princess who carried the worms to India 
 in her hair. Two Persian monks imported 
 silkworm eggs into Europe in hollow canes. 
 
 The inventors of labor-saving devices 
 in weaving had romantic, and usually 
 tragic, careers. Kay's model was destroyed 
 as a "dangerous piece of furniture," and 
 he died in want. Crompton, after much 
 misery, died a poor man. William Lee 
 invented the knitting machine because he 
 was jealous of the attention that his sweet- 
 heart gave to her needles. Lee died in 
 poverty; the fate of the sweetheart is not 
 told in the annals of manufacture. 
 
 To Jacquard, Napoleon said, "Are you 
 the man- who can do what God cannot — 
 tie a knot in a taut string?" 
 
 John Slater, an Englishman who was 
 the founder of the cotton industry in 
 America, started for his employees the 
 first vSunday School in the country. The 
 story of Eli Whitney's invention is famous. 
 
 Literature is full of allusions to this 
 great industry\ Joseph in Egypt was 
 "arrayed in fine linen;" in Leviticus the 
 plague was to be reported, "either in the 
 warp or in the woof." In James Lane 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 23 
 
 Allen's Reign of Law there is a wonderfully 
 beautiful description of the cycle of the 
 hemp industry; John Halifax gives an 
 account of the introduction of steam-run 
 machinery; Penelope's suitors were kept 
 off, so that she should not "lose her threads" 
 by taking unfinished goods from the loom. 
 Virgil describes silk as carded from leaves. 
 Early European pictures of the cotton 
 plant are ornamented with sheeps' heads 
 growing at the ends of branches on a tree. 
 Pepys' diary has an account of a dispute in 
 1663 on the question, Is calico linen? 
 
 "Jack of Newbury" a century and a half 
 earlier, had something like a factory^ — 
 
 Within one room, being large and long. 
 
 There stood two hundred looms full strong; 
 
 Two hundred men, the truth is so, 
 
 Wrought in these looms all in a row; 
 
 By every one a pretty boy 
 
 Sat making quills with mickle joy. 
 
 And in another place hard by 
 
 A hundred women merrily 
 
 Were carding hard with joyful cheer, 
 
 Who singing sat with voices clear. 
 
 Then to another room came they 
 
 Where children were in poor array, 
 
 And every one sat picking wool. 
 
 The finest from the coarse to cull. 
 
 Weave the warp and weave the woof, 
 
 The winding sheet of Edward's race, 
 
 Give ample room, and verge enough 
 
 The characters of Hell to trace. 
 
 — Gray, The Bard, II, 1. 
 
 My days are swifter than a weaver's 
 shuttle. Job VII, 6. 
 
 The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, 
 good and ill together. 
 
 —Alls Well That Ends Well, Act IV, Sc. 3. 
 
 O, what a tangled web we weave, 
 When first we practice to deceive! 
 
 — Scott, Marmion, Canto VI, St. 17. 
 
 Consider the lilies of the field, how they 
 grow, they toil not, neither do they spin. 
 
 —Matthew VI, 28. 
 
 Matrons and maidens sat in snow-white 
 
 caps and kirtles 
 Scarlet and blue and green, with distaffs 
 
 spinning the golden 
 Flax for the gossiping looms, whose nois}^ 
 
 shuttles within doors 
 Mingled their sounds with the whir of the 
 
 wheels and the songs of the maidens. 
 
 — Longfellow, Evangeline. 
 
 "Behold the fault is not in the Achaean 
 wooers but in mine own mother, for she is 
 the craftiest of women. For it is now the 
 third year, and the fourth is fast going by, 
 since she began to deceive the minds of the 
 Achaeans in their breasts. She gives hope 
 to all, and makes promises to every man, 
 and sends them messages, but her mind is 
 set on other things. And she hath derived 
 in her heart this wile besides; she set up 
 in her halls a mighty web, fine of woof and 
 very wide whereat she would weave, and 
 anon she spake among us: 
 " 'Ye princely youths, my wooers, now that 
 the goodly Odysseus is dead, do ye abide 
 patiently, how eager soever, to speed on 
 this marriage of mine till I finish the robe. 
 
 " 'I would not that the thread perish to 
 no avail, even this shroud for the hero 
 Laertes, against the day when the ruinous 
 doom shall bring him low, of death that 
 lays men at their length. So shall none of 
 the Achaean women in the land count it 
 blame in me as well might be, were he to 
 lie without a winding sheet, a man that had 
 gotten great possessions.' " 
 
 "So spake she, and our high hearts 
 consented thereto. So then in the day 
 time, she would weave the mighty web, and 
 in the night unravel the same, when she had 
 let place the torches by her. Thus for the 
 space of three years she hid the thing by 
 craft and beguiled the minds of the Achaeans; 
 but when the fourth year arrived and the 
 seasons came round, then the last one of her 
 women who knew all declared it, and we 
 found her unravelling the splendid web. 
 Thus she finished it perforce and sore 
 against her will." 
 
 — Homer's Odyssey II. 
 
 Butcher and Lang. 
 
24 
 
 Newark Museum Association 
 
 Then, as he opened the door, he beheld the 
 
 form of the maiden 
 Seated beside her wheel, and the carded wool 
 
 like a snow drift 
 Piled at her knee, her white hands feeding 
 
 the ravenous spindle. 
 While with her foot on the treadle she guided 
 
 the wheel in its motion. 
 
 — Courtship of Miles Standish. 
 
 Who can find a virtuous woman? For her 
 price is far above rubies. 
 
 She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh 
 willingly with her hands. 
 
 She layeth her hands to the spindle, and 
 her hands hold the distafi". 
 
 She maketh fine linen and selleth it; and 
 delivereth girdles unto the merchant. 
 
 —Proverbs, XXXI, 10, 13, 19, 24. 
 
 "When war's loud shuttle shall have 
 
 woven peace. 
 
 —A. 
 
 Austin in England's Darling. 
 
 Miss Nancy's Gown 
 By skillful hands this wondrous gown 
 
 Of costliest stuff was made. 
 Cocoons of France on Antwerp looms 
 
 Wrought to embossed brocade, 
 Where roses red and violets 
 
 In blooming beauty grew, 
 As if young May were there alway, 
 
 And June and April too. 
 A century since that gay time 
 
 The merry dance was trod, 
 Has passed, and Nancy long hath slept 
 
 Beneath the churchyard sod; 
 Yet on the brocade velvet gown 
 
 The rose and violet 
 Are blooming bright as on the night 
 
 She danced the minuet. 
 
 — Zitella Cocke. 
 
 Fair Philomel, she but lost her tongue. 
 And in a tedious sampler sewed her mind. 
 
 — Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare. 
 
 Oh my heart has two wild wings that ever 
 
 would be flying! 
 Oh my heart's a meadow lark that ever 
 
 would be free! 
 Well it is that I must spin until the light 
 
 be dying; 
 Well it is the little wheel must turn all day 
 
 for me ! 
 
 — Josephine Preston Peahody. 
 
 There she weaves by night and day 
 A magic web with colors gay. 
 She has heard a whisper say, 
 A curse is on her if she stay 
 
 To look down on Camelot. 
 She knows not what the curse may be, 
 And so she weaveth steadily. 
 And little other care hath she, 
 
 The I^ady of Camelot. 
 
 — Tennyson. 
 
 O men with sisters dear! 
 
 O men with mothers and wives! 
 It is not linen you're wearing out, 
 
 But human creatures' lives. 
 
 — Thomas Hood. 
 
 Verses on Samplers 
 Better by far for me 
 Than all the Simpsters Art 
 That God's commandments be 
 Embroidered on my Heart. 
 
 When I was Young 
 And in my Prime, 
 Here you may see 
 How I spent my time. 
 
 Helen Price it is my name, 
 And in my youth I work'd the same, 
 And by my work you may plainly see, 
 What care my Parents took of me. 
 
 "Sad sewers make sad samplers." 
 
 — Lord de Tahley. 
 
 Spinning 
 Like a blind spinner in the sun, 
 
 I tread my days; 
 I know that all the threads will run 
 
 Appointed ways; 
 I know each day will bring its task, 
 
 And, being blind, no more I ask. 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 25 
 
 Sometimes the threads so rough and fast 
 
 And tangled fly, 
 I know wild storms are sweeping past, 
 
 And fear that I 
 Shall fall; but dare not try to find 
 
 A safer place, since I am blind. 
 
 I listen, listen, day by day 
 
 To hear their tread 
 Who bear the finished web away, 
 
 And cut the thread, 
 And bring God's message in the sun, 
 "Thou poor blind spinner, work is done." 
 
 The Weaver 
 Ceaselessly the weaver, Time, 
 Sitting at his mystic loom. 
 Keeps his arrowy shuttle flying 
 Every thread anears our dying — 
 And with melancholy chime. 
 Very low and sad withal, 
 Sings his solemn madrigal 
 As he weaves our web of doom. 
 
 "Mortals!" thus he weaving sings, 
 Bright or dark the web shall be. 
 As ye will it; all the tissues. 
 Blending in harmonious issues 
 Or discordant colorings ; 
 Time the shuttle drives; but you 
 Give to every thread its hue. 
 And select your destiny. 
 
 God bestowed the shining warp. 
 Fill it with as bright a woof; 
 And the whole shall glow 
 As if wrought by angels finely. 
 To the music of the harp; 
 And the blended colors be 
 Like perfected harmony. 
 Keeping evil things aloof. 
 
 — Burleigh. 
 
 The Spinner 
 The spinner twisted her slender thread 
 As she sat and spun: 
 "The earth and the heavens are mine," 
 
 she said, 
 "And the moon and sun. 
 Into my web the sunlight goes. 
 And the breaths of May, 
 And the crimson life of the new blown rose 
 That was born to-day." 
 
 The spinner looked at the falling sun: 
 
 "Is it time to rest? 
 
 My hands are weary, — my work is done, 
 
 I have wrought my best; 
 
 I have spun and woven with patient eyes 
 
 And with fingers fleet. 
 
 Lo! where the tale of a lifetime lies 
 
 In a winding — sheet!" 
 
 — De Vere. 
 
 Spinning vSong 
 Tinkle, twinkle, pretty spindle; let the 
 
 white wool drift and dwindle, 
 Oh! we weave a damask doublet for my 
 
 love's coat of steel, 
 Hark! the timid, turning treadle crooning 
 
 soft, old-fashioned ditties, 
 To the low, slow murmur of the brown round 
 
 wheel. 
 
 — J. F. O'Donnell. 
 
 Spinster's Stint 
 Six skeins and three, six skeins and three! 
 Good mother, so you stinted me. 
 And here they be, — ay, six and three. 
 Stop busy wheel; stop noisy wheel! 
 Long shadows down my chamber steal, 
 And warn me to make haste and reel. 
 One, two, three stars along the skies, 
 Begin to wink their golden eyes, — 
 I'll leave my thread all knots and ties. 
 
 ■ — Alice Cary. 
 
 My life, which was so straight and plain. 
 Has now become a tangled skein. 
 Yet God still holds the thread; 
 Weave as I may his Hand doth guide, 
 The shuttle's course, however wide. 
 The chain in woof be wed. 
 
 And now I never lose my trust. 
 Weave as I may — and weave I must — 
 That God doth hold the thread. 
 He guides my shuttle on its way; 
 He makes complete my task each day; 
 What more, then, can be said? 
 
 — C. J. Moore. 
 
26 
 
 Newark Museum Association 
 
 Textiles in the United States and 
 New Jersey 
 
 When Columbus discovered America the 
 natives gave him skeins of cotton thread, 
 and he saw handkerchiefs "of fine cloth, 
 worked in colors." 
 
 The Delaware Indians inhabiting what is 
 now New Jersey were basket makers and 
 weavers when the country was colonized. 
 
 The colonists sowed cotton seed at James- 
 town, in 1607, and they had sheep there in 
 1609. 
 
 Many of the early settlers came from the 
 rural weaving districts of England. They 
 made linsey woolsey, a homespun cloth 
 of mixed flax and wool, for home use, and 
 in 1643 the first fulling mill, for scouring 
 and pressing homespun cloth, was built in 
 Massachusetts. Forty years later some 
 Germans set up a knitting machine in 
 Philadelphia, and 10 years later Boston had 
 the first worsted mill. 
 
 Soon there began trade between the 
 colonies and the West Indies — cotton and 
 rum for Indian and negro slaves — and 
 colonial wool was exchanged with France 
 for linen and with Spain for wine. 
 
 The early textile mills were in the upper 
 stories of stone grist mills. Improvements 
 in methods were slow. A story is told of a 
 cotton mill at Beverly, Massachusetts, in 
 1790, run by horse power. The horses were 
 driven by a boy who was afterward a 
 member of Congress. When the mill went 
 too fast the master would call out of the 
 window, "Hold on, there!" to regulate 
 the pace. 
 
 The policy of the English government to 
 discourage colonial trade and the jealousy 
 of English manufacturers which led to 
 preventing the export of machinery, delayed 
 the progress of American textile manu- 
 facture. Strange tales are told of machinery 
 shipped in pieces to France, and from there 
 brought to America under false labels. 
 The trade restrictions, as we know, brought 
 about our wars with England. 
 
 The policy of the Americans in the matter 
 of textiles was intensely patriotic. Bounties 
 were given to those who raised silk worms 
 
 or manufactured cloth. In 1753, a pro- 
 cession of 300 young women marched to 
 Boston Common with music, accompanied 
 by a platform on which was a weaver at 
 work. There they seated themselves and 
 spun, while weavers, "cleanly dressed" 
 in clothing of their own make, displayed 
 themselves. A Manufacturing House for 
 a spinning school was established later, bv 
 taxing carriages and coaches, and when the 
 British soldiers, in 1768, tried to take it for 
 a barrack, the teacher, one John Brown, 
 defied them successfully. Washington was 
 inaugurated in a suit woven at Hartford 
 in the first woolen mill in this country run 
 by power, and the senior class at Harward, 
 as early as 1768, dressed in American 
 fabrics for graduation. 
 
 Towards the end of the 18th centurv, 
 Samuel Slater, already mentioned for his 
 Sunday school, came over from England 
 with Arkwright's loom "in his head," 
 and reduced the cost of a yard of cloth 
 from 50 cents to 9 cents, while his wife 
 made the first cotton thread in America 
 In 1813 the first mill in the world in which 
 all the processes of spinning and weaving 
 were carried on by power, was established 
 in Waltham by Francis Cabot Lowell, who 
 had visited the English mills, and was 
 able, being a good mathematician, to 
 apply what he there learned. 
 
 The early mill owners employed the sons 
 and daughters of their American neighbors 
 as hands. An Englishman who visited the 
 Lowell mill described the girls, — "All were 
 clean, neat and fashionably attired with 
 reticules hanging from their arms and 
 calashes on their heads. The general ap- 
 pearance and deportment were such that 
 few British gentlemen in the middle ranks 
 of life need have been ashamed of leading 
 any of them to a tea party." Later, Irish 
 and French Canadians were employed. 
 And today many mills employ immigrants 
 from Russia, Poland, Bohemia, and other 
 near Eastern countries. Thus employers 
 and hands have become estranged, so that 
 mutual confidence and understanding have 
 grown difficult. 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 27 
 
 New Jersey 
 
 The proprietors of New Jersey, after its 
 transfer to England, offered every induce- 
 ment to trades people to settle. Scotch 
 settlers early introduced the raising of 
 flax and hemp in eastern Jersey. The 
 Quakers who settled in the south near 
 Salem began the manufacture of cloth. 
 In 1607, serges, druggets, crapes, camblets 
 (partly hair), plushes, and linen were made. 
 In 1703 John Clarke received 20 acres 
 of land for setting up a mill. 
 
 By 1784 New Jersey had 41 fulling mills 
 for household woolens, but no factories. 
 The farmers resisted the mills with all their 
 power. "Out upon the mills," said they, 
 "and the towns where they are built, 
 where there is neither pure air, the comforts 
 of a well stocked kitchen, nor morality." 
 
 Even as late as 1810 most of the textiles 
 made in the state were still being woven 
 in private families. 
 
 Silk has the most interesting history of 
 any textile in New Jersey. 
 
 The provinces of Virginia, South Carolina, 
 Pennsylvania and New Jersey early ofifered 
 bounties for the planting of mulberry 
 trees and for the production of reeled silk. 
 But by 1810 only 1800 yards were made 
 here. The bounties were no more successful 
 in other states. In 1828 Richard Rush, 
 then Secretary of the Treasury of the 
 United States, made a report to Congress 
 on the growth and manufacture of silk in 
 other countries. This report, called the 
 "Rush letter," stimulated the interest in 
 silk to such an extent that an appeal was 
 made to Congress to aid the industry by 
 bounties. Congress did not respond, but 
 a number of the states did, New Jersey 
 being one of them. This state passed an 
 act offering silk bounties in 1838. Fifteen 
 cents a pound was to be paid for cocoons. 
 200,000 mulberry trees were planted in New 
 Jersey. But the scarcity of the trees 
 induced speculation, the trees changed 
 hands at rapidly rising prices, and finally 
 in 1839 the bubble burst and the law was 
 repealed in the same year. The "Mulberry 
 
 Street," found in so many old New Jersey 
 towns, is a reminder of that bubble. 
 
 In 1791 a group of men under the inspi- 
 ration and guidance of Alexander Hamilton 
 established cotton mills at the Great Falls 
 of the Passaic. They bought 700 acres of 
 land for about $8,000, created a company, 
 got great powers from the state, engaged 
 L' Enfant, the man who made the plans for 
 the laying out of Washington, D. C, 
 to superintend the work, called their settle- 
 ment Paterson, and made a fine beginning 
 with a parade and ball in 1794. The 
 machinery was finished in mahogany and 
 all their ideas were on a magnificent scale. 
 The project failed, but the manufacturing 
 establishments in Paterson today prove 
 that Hamilton's vision was wisely placed. 
 
 The first silk mill in Paterson was started 
 by Christopher Colt, in 1838, in Colt's 
 pistol factory. John Ryle, an English 
 weaver, began making dress goods there 
 several years later. American supremacy in 
 silk, however, dates from the admission 
 into England at about the time of our 
 Civil War of French silks, duty free. 
 English silk weavers, who could not compete 
 with the French, came to America, and 
 many of them settled in Paterson. 
 
 Progress has been rapid since then, 
 partly because of the opportunities of the 
 state for trade, and partly because of the 
 supply of immigrant labor. 
 
 Although great eft'orts have been made 
 from time to time, by legislation, to get 
 fibres cultivated in the state, there has been 
 no permanent success. New Jersey's part 
 in the silk craze has been mentioned. As 
 late as 1880 New Jersey passed an act to 
 encourage the production and treatment 
 of fibres. Under this law the state offered 
 five dollars a ton for jute and rose or marsh- 
 mallow, six dollars a ton for hemp, seven 
 dollars a ton for flax and ten dollars a 
 ton for ramie or China grass. In order 
 to encourage the perfecting of machines 
 for removing the fibre from the stalks, 
 bounties were also offered for disintegrated 
 jute and ramie. $15,000 was appropriated 
 for paying the bounties, but only $10,000 
 was ever paid. 
 
28 
 
 Newark Museum Association 
 
 The following tables from the Census of 1810 give the condition of the textile 
 industry a century ago: 
 
 
 Looms 
 
 Carding Machines 
 
 Fulling Mills 
 
 
 Counties 
 
 No. 
 
 Value 
 in dollars 
 
 No. 
 
 Yards fulled 
 
 Value 
 in dollars 
 
 Spindles 
 
 Essex 
 
 762 
 712 
 533 
 140 
 
 31 
 655 
 190 
 192 
 350 
 117 
 766 
 144 
 
 56 
 
 6 
 
 28 
 19 
 16 
 
 4 
 10 
 
 7 
 
 7 
 
 15 
 
 2 
 
 7 
 7 
 
 
 
 43,000 
 59,000 
 21,700 
 19,000 
 13,500 
 32,400 
 
 
 9,900 
 
 Sussex 
 
 $37,254 
 
 29,500 
 
 19,950 
 
 6,975 
 
 12,100 
 
 11 
 4 
 4 
 2 
 8 
 5 
 2 
 6 
 3 
 3 
 4 
 
 $73,750 
 27,125 
 23,750 
 16,875 
 41,050 
 
 
 Hunterdon 
 
 22 
 
 Burlington 
 
 170 
 
 Monmouth 
 
 
 Morris 
 
 Middlesex 
 
 876 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 14,075 
 10,500 
 17,500 
 
 2,500 
 
 
 
 Somerset 
 
 14,450 
 16,880 
 
 
 Salem 
 
 13,500 
 
 
 Bergen 
 
 
 Cumberland 
 
 
 
 
 880 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Total amount 
 
 4,648 
 
 128 
 
 $147,854 
 
 52 
 
 204,640 
 
 $213,880 
 
 11,848 
 
 Counties 
 
 Cotton manufac- 
 turing establish- 
 ments 
 
 Mixed cloth 
 
 blended, and 
 
 unnamed 
 
 Flaxed goods 
 
 in families, 
 
 etc. 
 
 Woolen goods 
 
 in families. 
 
 etc. 
 
 Yards 
 made 
 
 Value 
 in dollars 
 
 Yards 
 made 
 
 Value 
 in dollars 
 
 Yards 
 made 
 
 Value 
 in dollars 
 
 Yards 
 made 
 
 Value 
 in dollars 
 
 
 
 
 201,836 
 78.210 
 20,580 
 32,196 
 18,749 
 14,063 
 
 $160,000 
 43,688 
 10,280 
 16,098 
 11,705 
 7,031 
 
 
 
 43,000 
 97,561 
 48,477 
 34,123 
 
 $40,000 
 
 Sussex 
 
 
 
 169,902 
 152,905 
 
 $67,960 
 61,162 
 
 73,170 
 
 Hunterdon 
 
 
 
 36.357 
 
 Burlington 
 
 
 
 34,123 
 
 Monmouth. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Morris 
 
 17,500 
 
 $2,625 
 
 164,240 
 108,720 
 
 54.746 
 43,488 
 
 60,830 
 35.831 
 
 45,628 
 
 M iddlesex 
 
 83.140 
 
 Gloucester 
 
 
 
 149,094 
 
 120.048 
 
 36,000 
 
 29,137 
 
 198,295 
 59,819 
 25,560 
 14,568 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Salem 
 
 
 
 44,200 
 
 139,035 
 
 68.467 
 
 22,100 
 69.517 
 31.850 
 
 13,200 
 11,739 
 29,552 
 
 9.900 
 
 Bergen 
 
 
 
 14.673 
 
 Cumberland 
 
 
 
 23,641 
 
 
 
 
 19,482 
 
 9,741 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Total amount 
 
 17,500 
 
 $2,625 
 
 719,395 
 
 $556,785 
 
 847,469 
 
 $350,823 
 
 374,313 
 
 $360,632 
 
 
 Blankets of 
 Wool 
 
 Carpeting and 
 covering 
 
 Silk manufactories 
 
 Stockings 
 
 Counties 
 
 No. 
 
 Value 
 in dollars 
 
 Yards 
 made 
 
 Value 
 in dollars 
 
 Yards 
 made 
 
 Value 
 in dollars 
 
 Pairs 
 
 Value 
 in dollars 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 278 
 
 $1,112 
 
 200 
 
 $60 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1,800 
 
 $1,800 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Cumberland 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 15.837 
 
 $11,877 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Total amount 
 
 278 
 
 $1,112 
 
 200 
 
 $60 
 
 1,800 
 
 $1,800 
 
 15.837 
 
 $11,877 
 
The Story of Textiles 
 
 29 
 
 At the present time, New Jersey manu- 
 factures silk and silk goods; woolen, worsted, 
 and felted goods and wool hats; cotton goods, 
 although mostly small cotton wares; fur felt 
 hats; cordage and twine and jute and linen 
 goods; hosiery and knit goods; carpets, rugs, 
 and linoleum. In 1909 almost one-fifth 
 of the wage earners in the state were 
 employed in these industries. 
 
 The progress of the textile industries in 
 New Jersey during the past decade is indi- 
 cated by the increase in the number of 
 spindles and looms and other equipment 
 reported for the four leading industries. 
 The total number of producing spindles 
 increased more than one-eighth. The tota 
 number of looms increased by about one- 
 fourth, the largest gain being in the cotton 
 goods industry, although the silk and woolen 
 industries both show substantial increases. 
 There was a decline in the woolen branch 
 of the woolen and worsted industry and a 
 rapid growth in the worsted, which means 
 that the state is making more of the better 
 grade of woolen cloth. 
 
 According to the census of 1910, in the 
 manufacture of silk New Jersey leads the 
 country, with 348 establishments which use 
 among them raw silk to the value of over 
 $23,000,000. Less spun silk, which is 
 inferior to the reeled, and less artificial silk 
 is used than in any other of the principal 
 silk producing states. 
 
 The state produces goods worth 
 $43,000,000 of broad silk, more than any 
 other of the states; $35,000,000 of all- 
 silk materials, also more than any other 
 state; $7,000,000 of mixed silk; $24,000,000 
 of plain and fancy silks, and $8,000,000 of 
 pattern silks made on the Jacquard loom — 
 the most expensive method of weaving. 
 This is nearly eight-ninths of all the Jacquard 
 silk made in the United States. Ribbon 
 valued at $14,000,000 is made in this state, 
 which is more than is made by any other 
 state. 
 
 In the making of oil cloth and linoleum 
 New Jersey also leads and she has more fur- 
 felt hat establishments than any other state 
 except Connecticut. 
 
 For the manufacture of woolen, worsted, 
 felted goods, and wool hats, this state is 
 surpassed by the number in the New 
 England states and by New York and Penn- 
 sylvania. New Jersey stands fifth among 
 the states in the value of the all-wool 
 woven goods produced; sixth in the value 
 of worsted coatings, serges, and suitings 
 for men's wear, and almost equals Massa- 
 chusetts, the principal wool manufacturing 
 state, in the manufacture of worsted dress 
 goods, probably the finest quality of wool 
 dress goods made. 
 
 In 1909 New Jersey was second in the list 
 of states in the dyeing and finishing of 
 textiles, and employed about one-quarter 
 of the total number of wage earners em- 
 ployed in that industry in the United 
 States. In the manufacture of rugs and 
 carpets, this state stands fourth with nine 
 establishments; is twelfth in the manu- 
 facture of cotton goods, and thirteenth in 
 the manufacture of hosiery and knit goods. 
 
 The output of plain and fancy cotton 
 fabrics, such as twills, sateens, and duck, 
 was smaller in quantity in 1909 than in 
 1904, but more than twice as great in value. 
 This is due largely to a decrease in the 
 production of fancy fabrics, and to a very 
 large increase in the production of high 
 grade duck. Cotton towels, toweling, 
 mosquito netting, and tapestries increased 
 about 90 per cent in quantity and 168 per 
 cent in value from 1904 to 1909. 
 
 Special Notes 
 
 The illustrations in this pamphlet, unless 
 otherwise indicated, are taken from Textiles 
 by Woolman and McGowan, N. Y., 1915, 
 and are used with the kind permission of 
 the MacMillan Co. 
 
 Some of our readers will be glad to know 
 that the Corticelli Silk Mills, Florence, Mass., 
 have made a specialty of supplying at small 
 expense specimens for object-lesson teaching, 
 showing the culture of silk. A descriptive 
 circular will be sent on request to teachers 
 and others interested. 
 
The twelve Japanese pictures illustrating silk making are reproduced from the series of colored 
 wood engravings designed by Utamaro, 1754-1840, one of the greatest of Japanese artists in this field. 
 The originals are 10x15 inches. 
 
 No. 1. Women placing silk worms' eggs on No. 2. Gathering of mulberry leaves for worms, 
 
 sheets of paper, with mulberry leaves chopped fine. The worms moult every 9 or 10 days of the 45 days 
 
 The eggs hatch in March. The worms are classified of their larval life, and eat ravenously between 
 
 by quality into 1st, 2nd and 3rd grades. moultings. 
 
 No. 3. Feeding worms with mulberry leaves No. 4. After the 3rd moulting, they require more 
 
 after their 2nd moulting. They are placed in large food, 
 trays for convenience in handling. 
 
No. 5. After their final moulting the worms No. 6. For spinning their cocoons, the worms are 
 prepare for the spinning of their cocoons. placed on trays. At the end of three days a thick, 
 
 firm cocoon is spun, consisting of a single continuous 
 thread over 1000 feet long. 
 
 No. 7. For purposes of breeding the moths are No. 8. Women and children admiring the moths 
 
 allowed to develop from some of the cocoons. They after they have escaped from the cocoons, 
 reach their maturity in 12 to 14 days. 
 
^^*n?f^''v^ 
 
 No. 9. To kill the worms inside, the cocoons are No. 10. Sorting the thread into two classes, 
 
 placed on a bamboo tray in boiling water. A The first is white and fine, the second darker and 
 
 worker finds the end of the silk thread and winds heavier, 
 it unbroken on a reeling machine. 
 
 No. 11. After the thread is sorted, preparations No. 12. Women weaving silk thread into cloth, 
 are made for weaving. 
 
 '/J(h^