Cotton 
18 
vent better methods. The British were the first to succeed, but 
recently Americans have surpassed them in the invention of im- 
provements. 
The spinning machine of today spins more than a thousand threads 
at a time and winds each on a spindle. One man running two such 
machines can make more than three hundred pounds of thread each 
day. We may be certain that we have not come to the end of im- 
provements; every few years new devices are invented to make 
thread faster, better, and cheaper. 
How cotton is woven into cloth. When the thread is spun, the next 
step is to weave it into cloth. In ancient times this was done by 
placing two sticks in parallel positions a few feet apart and stretching 
a great many threads — the warp — from one stick to the other in 
such a way that they would lie side by side. Then a single thread 
— the woof — was passed across the other threads, running over the 
first, under the second, over the third, under the fourth, and so on 
until it reached the other side. It was then passed back again, but 
this time it went over the threads that it had previously gone under, 
and under those that it had previously gone over. Later, the hand 
Fig. 11. Primitive cotton manufacturing as carried on in northern India 
the left is spinning; the man at the right is weaving 
Ellsworth Huntington 
today. The man at