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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.