Today, we think abour worsted wool. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
A fine old Irish tune has been on my mind lately. It's a song that has, for a long time, surfaced from time to time within the workers' movement. The chorus goes like this:
If it was not for the weavers, what would you do?
You wouldn'a hae the clothes that's made of wool
You wouldn'a hae a coat of the black or the blue
If it was not for the work of the weavers
Now here's an 1877 book on British industries with an article on wool in it. The Luddites had, by then, long since lost their battle. Wool was generally factory-spun and factory-woven.
The author identifies himself as Worsted Spinner. Then he rather peevishly complains about a recent letter from Her Majesty's Inspectors of Factories. They've written to ask several questions, including whether his factory made worsted or wool.
The author reacts as you might to someone asking if a computer is digital or a PC. Worsted, he says, is always a form of wool. The catch is, he's talking about yarn, not cloth. What he doesn't say is that many English weavers were already mixing other yarns with worsted yarn when they wove so-called worsted fabrics.
To understand the word worsted, we need to remember that sheep might have short or long hair. To prepare short-fiber wool for spinning, you first card it, then spin it into a softer yarn. Woolen flannel is a product of such yarn. Irish and American sheep are typically shorthaired, and Irish wool is known for its softness.
But the wool of English longhaired sheep is combed out until the strands lie parallel. Worsted is spun from that wool. It yields a more orderly yarn. The physical appearance of worsted cloth (mixed or pure) is not what we normally think of when we say wool. It's harder and smoother. Under a microscope, worsted yarn (or thread) looks more like rope than soft wool yarns. The soft yarns have loose ends that fly about and give them fuzzy edges.
All this was a big concern a century ago. The modern Encyclopaedia Britannica dismisses wool with a couple of short columns. The 1911 edition offered a fifteen-page, double-column article that explains everything. It even includes glossy microphotographs of wool fibers that show their scaly pineapple-like surface.
That rough surface causes fibers to grasp one another. Wool made from non-worsted yarn can be felted -- washed in hot water until the fibers cling to one another, regardless of the weave. The reason wool shrinks so badly in hot water is that its fibers ratchet up along one another. They clump and then won't let go.
So the weavers in the song were thinking about British wool. Here in hot Houston we gravitate toward cotton instead. But all the clothes on our various backs have to've been woven. Another line from the song says
Wi' our glasses in our hands and our work upon our back,
For, mechanized or manual -- wool or cotton -- our clothing does, indeed, all come back to the weavers.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
The article I refer to was: W. S. B. McLaren, Wool and Worsted. -- IV. Great Industries of Great Britain, Vol. I, (London: Cassell Peter & Galpin, 1877-1880), pp. 138-142
Yarns, Cloth Rooms, Mill Engineering, Reeling and Baling, Winding. International Library of Technology: A Series of Textbooks for Persons Engaged in ... (Scranton: International Textbook Co., 1906). (No authors are named. The five articles are all dated either 1902 or 1905.)
I am grateful to Karl Ittmann, UH History Department, for additional counsel on this episode.
The Work of the Weavers
We're all met together here to sit and to crack
Wi' our glasses in our hands and our work upon our back
There's nae a trade among 'em that can mend or can mak
If it wasn't for the work of the weavers
If it was not for the weavers, what would you do?
You wouldn'a hae the clothes that's made of wool
You wouldn'a hae a coat of the black or the blue
If it was not for the work of the weavers
There's soldiers and there's sailors and glaziers and all
There's doctors and there's ministers and them that live by law
And our friends in Sooth America, though them we never saw
But we can they wear the work of the weavers
If it was not for the weavers, what would you do?
You wouldn'a hae the clothes that's made of wool
You wouldn'a hae a coat of the black or the blue
If it was not for the work of the weavers
Though weavin' is a trade that never can fail
As long as we need clothes for to keep another hale
So let us all be merry o'er a bicker of good ale
And we'll drink to the health of the weavers
If it was not for the weavers, what would you do?
You wouldn'a hae the clothes that's made of wool
You wouldn'a hae a coat of the black or the blue
If it was not for the of the weavers