How It's Made

Cloth Manufacturing: "HowTextile Mills are Modernizing" 1948 General Electric 26min

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• published: 13 Feb 2012
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more at http://clothing.quickfound.net/ "How electricity can modernize textile mills. Great shots of cotton mills, processing and textile manufacturing; technical narration laced with industry jargon. In Technicolor." NEW VERSION with improved video & sound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi1UTQ23RBA Public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archive, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and equalization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_manufacturing Textile manufacturing is a major industry. It is based in the conversion of three types of fibre into yarn, then fabric, then textiles. These are then fabricated into clothes or other artifacts. Cotton remains the most important natural fibre, so is treated in depth. There are many variable processes available at the spinning and fabric-forming stages coupled with the complexities of the finishing and colouration processes to the production of a wide ranges of products. There remains a large industry that uses hand techniques to achieve the same results... Cotton is grown anywhere with long, hot dry summers with plenty of sunshine and low humidity. Indian cotton, gossypium arboreum, is finer but the staple is only suitable for hand processing. American cotton, gossypium hirsutum, produces the longer staple needed for machine production.[3] Planting is from September to mid November and the crop is harvested between March and May. The cotton bolls are harvested by stripper harvesters and spindle pickers, that remove the entire boll from the plant. The cotton boll is the seed pod of the cotton plant, attached to each of the thousands of seeds are fibres about 2.5 cm long... The seed cotton goes in to a Cotton gin. The cotton gin separates seeds and removes the "trash" (dirt, stems and leaves) from the fibre. In a saw gin, circular saws grab the fibre and pull it through a grating that is too narrow for the seeds to pass. A roller gin is used with longer staple cotton. Here a leather roller captures the cotton. A knife blade, set close to the roller, detaches the seeds by drawing them through teeth in circular saws and revolving brushes which clean them away.[5] The ginned cotton fibre, known as lint, is then compressed into bales which are about 1.5 m tall and weigh almost 220 kg. Only 33% of the crop is usable lint. Commercial cotton is priced by quality, and that broadly relates to the average length of the staple, and the variety of the plant. Longer staple cotton (2½ in to 1¼ in) is called Egyptian, medium staple (1¼ in to ¾ in) is called American upland and short staple (less than ¾ in) is called Indian.[6] The cotton seed is pressed into a cooking oil. The husks and meal are processed into animal feed, and the stems into paper... Cotton is farmed intensively and uses large amounts of fertiliser and 25% of the worlds insecticide. Native Indian variety were rainwater fed, but modern hybrids used for the mills need irrigation, which spreads pests. The 5% of cotton-bearing land in India uses 55% of all pesticides used in India.[3] Before mechanisation, cotton was harvested manually and this unpleasant task was done by the lower castes, and in the United States by slaves of African origin... Most spinning today is done using Break or Open-end spinning, this is a technique where the staples are blown by air into a rotating drum, where they attach themselves to the tail of formed yarn that is continually being drawn out of the chamber. Other methods of break spinning use needles and electrostatic forces. This method has replace the older methods of ring and mule spinning. It is also is easily adapted for artificial fibres. The spinning machines takes the roving, thins it and twists it, creating yarn which it winds onto a bobbin. In mule spinning the roving is pulled off a bobbin and fed through some rollers, which are feeding at several different speeds.This thins the roving at a consistent rate. If the roving was not a consistent size, then this step could cause a break in the yarn, or could jam the machine. The yarn is twisted through the spinning of the bobbin as the carriage moves out, and is rolled onto a cop as the carriage returns. Mule spinning produces a finer thread than the less skilled ring spinning... The weaving process uses a loom. The lengthway threads are known as the warp, and the cross way threads are known as the weft. The warp which must be strong needs to be presented to loom on a warp beam. The weft passes across the loom in a shuttle, that carries the yarn on a pirn. These pirns are automatically changed by the loom. Thus, the yarn needs to be wrapped onto a beam, and onto pirns before weaving can commence...