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Modern Business Geography
loom lifted or lowered all the warp threads at once. Even today in
the cotton-growing parts of Asia, Africa, and South America, much
cotton is laboriously woven on hand looms. In our great factories
the process of weaving is the same, except that it is done rapidly by
machinery, with a fly-shuttle, instead of slowly by hand.
As England was the first to give the world high-speed machinery
for spinning, so was she the first to invent a machine for weaving.
The spinning machine made necessary the weaving machine. Be-
fore these two machines had been invented, a weaver could use the
thread of six spinners; often he had to go from house to house
among the spinners in the morning to get enough thread to weave
during the afternoon. But the spinning machine produced such great
quantities of thread that the weavers could not use it all. Then
Arkwright invented the power loom, which could weave all the thread
obtainable.
In weaving machines, as in spinning machines, there has been con-
stant improvement, and now the mill operative has merely to tie up
occasional breaks in the threads and at intervals to refill the auto-
matic shuttle supply. One weaver can tend ten to twenty of the
latest automatic looms, making in all two hundred or more square
yards of cloth a day.
How cotton cloth is bleached. After the cloth is woven it may be
bleached or dyed, or both, according to the use to which it is to be
put. Most of the undyed cloth that we use is bleached. About
half of all the cloth made of cotton is dyed.
Bleaching is necessary because the white cotton becomes discol-
ored, chiefly with oil from the machinery and with the “sizing,” or
starch, which is put on the warp thread just before weaving to hold
the fibers together and thus make the thread strong and smooth.
[n the process of bleaching, the cloth is boiled with lime, washed,
soaked in sulphuric acid, washed again, boiled with lime and ash and
resin, washed a third time, soaked in chlorid of lime, placed again in
acid, and then given a fourth and last washing. Each treatment is
to remove either some special impurity or the surplus of the previous
chemical.
This part of the cotton industry shows how thoroughly dependent
one industry is on many others. As modern spinning and weaving
depend upon the industries that make machines, so bleaching depends
upon the manufacture of chemicals.
How cotton is dyed. The dyeing of cotton, even more than the
bleaching, illustrates the dependence of one industry on another.