essful inspiration came to
him whilst watching his daughters comb out their long hair. The ultimate
result was that he invented a machine which was shown at the great
exhibition of London in 1851 and immediately attracted the attention of
the textile manufacturers of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Large sums of money were paid him by certain of the Lancashire cotton
spinners for its exclusive use in the cotton trade. Certain of the
woollen masters of Yorkshire did the same, for its exclusive application
to their trade, and it was also adopted for other textiles, although
Heilman himself only lived a short time after his great success.

It must be understood that the comber is only used by a comparatively
small proportion of the cotton spinners of the world. For all ordinary
purposes a sufficiently good quality of yarn can be made without the
comber, and no other machine in cotton spinning adds half as much as the
comber to the expense of producing cotton yarn from the raw material.

To show this point with greater force, it may be mentioned that the
comber may make about 17 per cent. of waste, which is approximately as
much as all the other machines in the mill put together would make.

Its use, however, is indispensable in the production of the finest
yarns, since no other machine can extract short fibre like the comber.
It is seldom used for counts of yarn below 60's and often as fine yarns
as 100's or more are made without the comber. In England its use is
chiefly centred in the localities of Bolton, Manchester, and Bollington,
although there is a little combing in Preston, Ashton under Lyne, and
other places.

Perhaps its greatest value consists in the fact that its use enables
fine yarns to be made out of cotton otherwise much too poor in quality
for the work; this being rendered possible chiefly by the special virtue
possessed by the comber of extracting all fibres of cotton below a
certain length. This of course has led to the increased production and
consequently reduced price of the better qualities of yarn.

Reverting now to the Heilman Comber as it stands to-day, an excellent
idea of the machine as a whole will be gathered from the photograph in
Fig. 31.

There are usually six small laps being operated upon simultaneously in
one comber. Each small lap being from 7-1/2 inches to 10-1/2 inches
wide, being placed on fluted wooden rollers behind the machine, is
slowly unwound by frictional contact therewith, a