Top balls (!):
The next stage of the worsted manufacturing process was Top making or Finishing. The wool slivers were further treated to make them a uniform thickness and moisture was added to enhance the suppleness of the wool. The Top ball produced was the woolcomber's finished product and the Tops could be packed and transported like this.
Many of the textile mills in Bradford specialised in just part of the overall manufacturing process - woolcombers or spinners; whereas Salts Mill was such a huge enterprise that it saw the complete process through from end to end - from raw wool to the finished worsted cloth.
That had been Sir Titus Salt's vision for Salt's Mill and village, to concentrate all the processes from his various mills in Bradford into one enormous factory. He bought the land, on a greenfield site well away from the filth of disease-ridden central Bradford, and, in the 1850s, set about creating a much healthier place for his employees to live and work.
Oh besides the production, I didn't know that the placing of the factory was to avoid disease in an older town. The wool just looks so yummy soft.
ReplyDeleteI see a lot of similarities to what I've learned from visits to the textile museums in my own area here in Sweden. Here there were mostly cotton mills though. The textile museum here in Borås I visit quite often for their temporary exhibitions but they also have a permanent exhibition of old machinery. And last summer I revisited the old mill in Rydal, which I also blogged about (and I seem to recall you commented on that post). I also grew up in a village (Sjuntorp near Trollhättan) where there was a cotton mill. I had classmates whose parents worked there.
ReplyDeleteFor 10 years I have worked for an American textile company, and I have visited quite a lot of these mills and as I always had to translate French into English, I learned all this special vocabulary, which now I have forgotten, in both languages !
ReplyDeleteForward thinking.
ReplyDelete