productive than the
mule, owing to its being a continuous spinner. Another vast advantage
that it possesses is the extreme simplicity of its parts and work as
compared with the mule. Because of this, women and girls are invariably
employed on the ring frames, whereas it requires skilled and well-paid
workmen for the mules.

=The Combing Machine.=--As compared with the Scutcher, the Carding Engine
and Mule, the Comber is a much more modern machine. Combing may be
defined as being the most highly perfected application of the carding
principle.

The chief objects aimed at by the comber are:--To extract all fibres
below a certain length; to make the fibres parallel; and to extract any
fine impurities that may have escaped the scutching and carding
processes.

It is worthy of note that although nearly all the great inventions
relating to cotton-spinning have been brought out by Englishmen, the
combing machine is a notable exception. It was invented a few years
prior to 1851 by Joshua Heilman, who was born at Mulhouse, the principal
seat of the Alsace cotton manufacture, in 1796.

Like Samuel Crompton--the inventor of the mule--Joshua Heilman appears
to have possessed the inventive faculty in a high degree, and he
received an excellent training in mathematics, mechanical drawing,
practical mechanics, and other subjects calculated to assist him in his
career as an inventor.

Heilman was the inventor of several useful improvements in connection
with spinning and weaving machinery, but the invention of the comber was
undoubtedly his greatest achievement.

He was brought up in comparatively easy circumstances, and married a
wife possessing a considerable amount of money; but all that both of
them possessed was swallowed up by Heilman's expenses in connection with
his inventions, and he himself was only raised from poverty again by the
success of the comber shortly before his death, his wife having died in
the midst of their poverty many years previously.

After Heilman became possessed of the idea of inventing a combing
machine, he laboured incessantly at the project for several years,
first in his native country and subsequently in England. The firm of
Sharpe & Roberts, formerly so famous in connection with the self-actor
mule, made him a model, which, however, did not perform what Heilman
required.

Afterwards he returned again to his native Alsace still possessed with
the idea, and finally it is said that the succ