er it. When
sufficiently carded, a rod furnished with parallel projecting needles,
called a "needle stick," was pushed amongst the card teeth to strip the
fibres from the comb. The strip thus procured was rolled into a sliver
and spun. James Hargreaves, the inventor of the spinning jenny,
suspended the movable comb by passing two cords over pulleys fixed in
the ceiling and attached balance weights to opposite ends of the cords.
This enabled him to lengthen the cards, to apply two or three to the
same stock and to manipulate the top one with less labour, as well as to
produce more and better work. In May of 1748, Daniel Bourn, of
Leominster, patented a machine in which four parallel rollers were
covered with cards, and set close together. Fibres were fed to the first
rotating roller, each in turn drew them from the preceding one, and a
grid was employed to remove the carded material from the last roller.
This introduced the principle of carding with revolving cylinders whose
surfaces were clothed with cards working point to point. In December of
the same year Lewis Paul, of Birmingham, the inventor of drawing
rollers, patented two types of carding engines. In one, parallel rows of
spaced cards were nailed upon a cylinder which was revolved by a winch
handle. Beneath the cylinder a concave trough had a card fixed on the
inside, so that as the fibres passed between the two series of teeth
they were combed. This was the origin of "flat-carding," namely, nailing
strips of stationary cards upon transverse pieces of wood and adjusting
the strips or flats by screws to the cylinder. In 1762, the father of
Sir Robert Peel, with the assistance of Hargreaves, erected and used a
cylinder carding engine which differed in some important particulars
from Bourn's invention. But although roller-carding and flat-carding are
the only principles in use at the present time, to Sir Richard Arkwright
belongs the merit of introducing an automatic carding engine, for
between the years 1773 and 1775 he combined the various improvements of
his predecessors, entirely remodelled the machine, and added parts
which made the operation continuous. So successful were these cards that
some of them were in use at the beginning of the present century.
Notwithstanding the numerous and important changes that have been made
since Arkwright's time, carding remains essentially the same as
established by him. (See COTTON-SPINNING MACHINERY.) (T. W. F.)