12 
Modern Business Geography 
swing Galloway 
Fig. 10. The weaving room in a modern cotton factory at Lowell, Massachusetts. 
it is cast into the mouth of a machine to be cleaned. In the cleaning 
machine the fibers are thoroughly picked apart, so that all the dirt 
collected in the field or on the journey to the mill may drop out. 
How cotton is spun. Let us follow our cotton hastily through the 
many processes of the mill. There are more than forty steps to be 
taken before it becomes finished cloth, but we shall observe only the 
main ones. 
Spinning is one of the chief steps. To prepare the cotton for spin- 
ning, a great machine brushes it, straightening out tangles and care- 
fully arranging the fibers in parallel order. The machine delivers 
the cotton in the form of a thick, porous ribbon called a sliver.” 
The sliver is passed through set after set of rollers which gradually 
pull it into a soft, fuzzy thread. Many threads are then twisted to- 
gether by a spinning machine. The twisting makes strong, compact, 
smooth “yarn,” such as the thread we buy for sewing. 
We can get a good notion of how thread is spun by pulling a bit of 
cotton batting or absorbent cotton from a roll and twisting it between 
the thumb and forefinger. We should have difficulty in making a 
smooth thread of uniform firmness. Yet in ancient times spinning 
was carried on in almost this way. Even now, in backward regions 
such as the interior of China, central Brazil, and remote parts of 
India, people employ this crude method of spinning cotton for 
their simple clothing. Progressive peoples early began to in-