The Sun.
London, England, 1865-01-24 00:00:00

Weaving by Compressed Air.

None of our great mechanical contrivances when
in the full tide of work contribute more importantly
to the national prosperity of the kingdom than our
power-looms. Their number is close upon 500,000,
the manufacture to supply their wear and tear
amounts for home consumption alone to 40,000
looms yearly ; they give employment to nearly
800,000 men, women, and children ; and before the
great disaster of the American war fell upon our
cotton districts they produced exports to the
value of £72,000,000 sterling. Immense as are the
interests thus engaged, the industry seems yet as
capable of almost indefinite extension as it did 20
years ago. As recently as 1862 Lord Derby in the
House of Lords spoke of there being 110 new cotton
mills then in course of erection in the manu-
facturing districts, and some of these buildings
were, as his Lordship stated, of unprecedented
magnitude. For the germs of this stupendous
branch of national industry the country is indebted
to the genius of Dr. Cartwright, who, towards the
close of the last century, invented a power-loom,
in which mechanical pickers" were substituted
for the hands of the weaver in throwing the shuttle
to and fro. This rough though ingenious piece
of mechanism he afterwards brought to the
highest perfection it was capable of attaining by
driving the loom by steam, for which inven-
tion he very deservedly received a reward of
£lO,OOO from the Government. His invention
indeed, as compared with that which it soon every-
where superseded, deserved all praise, though,
viewed now by the light of its own merits as a mere
mechanical contrivance to perform a certain amount
of work with as little loss of power as possible, it
can never take very high rank as a piece of ma-
chinery. The whole design of the " pickers" which
replaced the weaver's arms is more remark-
able as showing the bent of Dr. Cartwright's
original surgical studies than as a good mechanical
contrivance—just such a machine, in short, as we
should expect an anatomist, but not an engineer, to
invent. The " pickers" are at best but clumsy iron
arms, to the rigid movements of which some supple-
ness is imparted by what we may call the muscles of
buffalo hide. So far is the power exerted from its
source, so ill adapted are the means through which
it is conveyed, that a pressure of 481 b. has to be
exercised at one end of the arm to educe a pressure
of some Bor 9 ounces at the other. Since that time,
now 80 years ago, no great improvement in principle
has been made in Dr. Cartwright's power loom.
Many alterations have been made in detail, such as
the protector loom by Mr. Miller, the crank loom by
Mr. Horrocks, and without which Cartwright's loom
could not well have been worked with safety to the
weaver or the weft ; but, as we have said, no change
has taken place in principle, though some of the
details have been undoubted improvements and of
great practical value. What the grievnnces were
which were remedied may be guessed by those which
still remain behind, and though we have neither
j time nor space to recount them all, . nor would
their technical phraseology be very intelligible to
_ _

our readers if we did, still enough may be told to
shOw how much yet remains to be accomplished.
First, the picker, to perform its peculiar duties and
throw the shuttle to and fro, has to work its leather
muscles over an iron spindle at a considerable loss
of power from hard friction. To relieve this fric-
tion the spindle has to be kept oiled, or it heats, and
is torn out bodily by the picker. If too much
oiled, as it generally is to enable the weavers to
work fast, the picker throws the oil on the weft, and
for every spot the weaver is fined 6d ; while the
spots deteriorate the value of the piece from 2s to
3s. If the picks work too fast or too slow then the
loom " bangs," or the shuttle turns over, or the
selvages are bad, and the piece is spoilt. Then
again the picker cuts the weft, blacks the weft,
breaks the thread, or knocks off the " cops," be-
sides other less serious evils, all due to the direct
action of the picker, or some one of its very many
complicated parts. As we have said, the attention

of all loom-makers has been constantly fixed on the
improvement of their looms, in simplifying or in-
creasing their powers of motion, but the alterations
have had no reference to changing the principle or-
dinarily employed in propelling the shuttle,
the imperfection of which are so detrimental
to its full working effect. But now an inven-
tion, or we might almost term it a discovery,
has recently been made by Mr. C. W. Harrison

of a means of driving the shuttle, at once so

novel, yet so perfectly simple, that the only wonder
now is why it was never thought of before. It
consists not in improving the picker, or lessening
its cumbrous appendages, but in doing away with
them at once and for ever, and substituting for all
that imperfect motion the driving of the shuttle by
means of compressed air on a principle as simply as
it is beautifully applied. This total change from
the old system may be said to at once remove all
those contingencies which disturb the action of the
present looms, and which we have already described,

and to reduce the conditions of velocity of the loom
to one consideration only—the strength of the staple

employed.
To realise the superiority of this simple improve-
ment over the ordinary calico loom worked with
pickers, those interested in this question have but to
visit the Swan-wharf, London-bridge, where, side
by side, the two looms can now be seen in action
every day. The comparative silence of the pneu-
matic loom, almost only broken as its jets of com-
pressed air lightly blow the shuttle backwards and
forwards, the rapidity and certainty with which the
shuttle flies, and the beautifully even texture of its
work, show at a glance that the present method is
really distanced beyond a chance of competition
by the new. Both machines, it must be remem-
bered, work under precisely the same conditions as to
amount of steam power, yet the useful maximum
and working velocity of the picker loom is 180
strokes or picks a minute ; while the pneumatic
throws its shuttle with the most perfect ease and
precision at 250 and 260 picks a minute. At
these comparative rates of speed, although the
yarns are of precisely the same quality and number
in both machines, breakages are common in the
picker loom and rarely, if ever, happen in the new.
Nor is the difference less signally demonstrated when
both are disconnected from the steam engine, and the
visitor tries to work them by hand. The pneumatic
loom can be kept in rapid motion easily, while the
heavy nature of the parts and the great waste of
power which the pickers occasion require the efforts
of a strong man to keep the present loom going even
slowly. The saving of steam power from this in-
creased facility of movement would of itself be an
enormous gain, if there were no other, as it is cal-
culated that the steam power now requisite to drive
eight of the present looms will suffice for 15 on the
pneumatic principle. This economy of power, how-
ever, Mr. Page, the engineer who has been called
in to make a report on the comparative merits of the
new and present loom, thinks even of less moment
than the saving in cost, lightness, durability, and
immensely increased powers of production which
the new loom offers. In practice, and as far as it ,
has yet been tried, the new loom beats the old under
all circumstances by at least one-third greater
powers of production ; but allowing it only a gain
of 25 per cent., this, Mr. Page estimates, would
give, taking the average production of present
looms at 222 yards per week, or 11,100 yards a
year, an annual increase of 2,800 yards to each
pneumatic loom. This calculation carried a step
further, and supposing the pneumatic principle ap-
plied to all the 500,000 looms in the kingdom,
as it is presumed such an improvement will be gra-
dually, their increased powers would represent an
aggregate increase of production of 1,400,000,000
yards of fabric—an almost unappreciable number,
but which may be better understood when we say a
strip of calico a yard wide, long enough to reach
from the world to the moon and back again more
than 20 times. In first cost it is stated that the new
loom is cheaper than those now in use, and, if
cheaper and more handy to work, all the rest is
easily enough demonstrated, for on examination with
a strong magnifying glass at once shows the great
superiority as to texture and neatness of work by the
pneumatic over the fabric turned out by the present
looms. The means of applying the compressed air
to the new loom are as simple as all other parts of
the invention.

There is, of course, in the first instance an air-
pump, which may be readily connected with the
ordinary steam-engine. The air is forced into a
small cylinder, and is conducted thence by pipes to
each loom. A flexible pipe connects the tube in
each loom with a service pipe on the floor, and at
each revolution of a wheel with a graduated cog a
small valve is raised, which immediately admits the
air as required into the shuttle-box at either end.
So far as• the other working portions of the loom
are concerned there is really no difference between
the present power-loom and the new one. The
mode of forming warp and weft, and of carrying
the thread by the shuttle, remains the same. The
great feature of difference is that the shuttle is
wafted to and fro by a breath of air instead of being
driven backwards and forwards by the blows of the
" pickers" attached to the flexible arms of the me-
chanical levers. The principle, it is scarcely neces-
sary to say, can be applied equally to looms re-
quired for cotton, flax, woollen, or silk fabrics.
Another and not an unimportant item in the use of
the new machines is the sanitary improvement they
would effect in the rooms of the factories them-
selves, which are now kept hot to keep the oil on the
spindles fluid, while the oil itself gives off a very
offensive smell. The oil would be dispensed with,
together with the:spinclle, and their place supplied
by the jets of cool air which each " pick" of the
looms, of course, liberates with the discharge of the
shuttles.
Altogether the new loom seems to justify the high
expectations which have been formed of it in Man-
chester, Glasgow, and our leading manufacturing
towns, and, apart from its own peculiar merits, we
gladly hail the principle of the machine as the fore-
runner of other adaptations of the pneumatic motor,
which seems capable of almost indefinite extension
to light mechanical contrivances of a similar kind.
Even, however, if only the results anticipated are
gained from this important application of com-
pressed air-power the country will be a large gainer,
and Mr. Harrison's invention be entitled to take
rank even before that of Mr. Bessemer in the im-
portant list of ourrecent manufacturing discoveries.
—Times.