Standardized Boxes

For many years, large mills are erected all over America. Most are nearly identical, with five levels. Power is generated at the basement level, by huge waterwheels or water turbines. Later mills use massive steam engines.

Above that are four floors of orderly workspaces, each devoted to a particular task. The floors have long rows of identical machines, tended mostly by young females. The jobs are crushingly boring, six days a week.

The women have just a few tasks, which can be mastered in a month, at most. They stand in front of the equipment, waiting for one of the occasional conditions that will require stopping a machine. There are no chairs.

Waterwheels turn slowly and silently below. On the floors above, equipment whirs and clatters to the hum of belts and pulleys. On the top floor, the whacking of the power looms is deafening. Girls have to shout to be heard.


	Campus Style The view above shows a typical mill complex at Lowell. The tall building is the mill, where most of the equipment is located. In front are worker dormitories, just minutes away by foot. This allows operators to put in full, 12-hour days. In Lowell, total mill output doubles about every 20 years, but the number of workers grows only a quarter as fast. This means that more and more work is being squeezed out of existing workers and equipment, as work rates increase. This establishes a trend which continues to the present day, in most American industries.



	Layer Cakes Textile mills are organized like a big layer cake, with the power unit at the bottom. Canal water is diverted into the basement level, where it turns a series of waterwheels (lower left) or water turbines. The mill shown at top left has water turbines. Either way, leather belting is used to transfer power to overhead power shafts on each floor. Long rows of identical machines on every level (right) are connected to the power shafts. Operators typically tend several machines, making sure that everything is operating smoothly. If the equipment needs to be stopped, the operator pulls the clutch lever to disengage power from the still-rotating pulleys, then fixes the problem. Like most mass-production operations, the work is tedious and boring.


	Pulling Yarn Incoming bales of cotton (or other fiber) arrive at the basement level, where the waterwheels are located. The bales are opened and cleaned, then moved to the lowest production floor, where pre-spinning operations are performed. This includes stretching and aligning steps (left), which produce soft, loose ropes of fiber stored in tall round cans (lower right). Ropes from these cans are then combined, three at a time, and stretched with a bit more twist into a much tighter, but still coarse yarn. All these steps are required because the raw fibers are each quite short. They must be teased into a thin but consistent yarn, without weak spots. The looms have mechanical sensors that stop the machine if any of the yarns break, to limit defects in the fabric.


	More Pulling and Twisting The spinning process reduces the diameter of the yarn yet further, preparatory to weaving, and includes two or three steps. At each step, several strands are combined, while being stretched and twisted again (top right). This reduces the thickness of the yarn, and increases the strength. Lighter yarns are wound onto thin spindles to be loaded into shuttles for the looms. Strongest yarns are wound onto larger spindles, ready to be combined onto the big drums which are mounted at the rear of the looms. Most photos of old textile mills are views of the spinning floor (lower left), with its seemingly endless racks of individual spindles. Each spindle is wound with a single long strand of spun fiber.


	Finally, Ready to Weave After spinning, huge racks containing many separate spools are arranged to feed yarn onto a single wide drum (top and bottom left), which will be taken upstairs and loaded onto the rear of a loom. The wider the fabric being woven, the greater the number of yarns that must be wound onto the drum, each at the proper spacing. The top floor of the mill contains the power looms (top and bottom right) which clatter away, sending the crosswise yarn in the shuttles flying back and forth. Before each pass of the shuttle, the loom raises up every other lengthwise yarn. On the reverse trip, the opposite set of yarns are raised, weaving all the yarns into one very long, continuous piece of fabric. It is then ready for final inspection, before finishing operations like dying or printing.


	Leather Belts One canal often supplies water to mills on both sides (top left). At each mill, some of the flow is diverted into the basement level, to drive the main power shafts. Belts from these main shafts run up through the floors to drive power distribution shafts on each floor, mounted on the ceiling (lower left). Machines on each floor are driven by individual belts from the overhead shafts. The belts are long strips of leather, joined into loops using metal staples (lower right). Since the main power shafts rotate all the time, clutches are installed at each machine to allow disengaging from the shaft, when required (top right). The two forks on the clutch are moved sideways, to ease the belt from the main drive pulley onto an adjacent, free-wheeling pulley.