STOREROOM.-WAITING SHIPMENT.

clothing. If it is autumn when he visits us, he will first walk or drive down a road stretching probably through a wide expanse of the tall hibiscus-like plants, loaded with their snowy fleece. At the factory he secures his passport from the manager, or perhaps the manager's personal escort, and starts at the starting-point, the vital center. If it be a steam-power mill, this will be the boiler-room-the source of all the mighty power where the centuried sunshine stored in the coal is transformed into an active energy to be applied to water, which, in its most forceful form, passes on to pulsate the great engine heart. With a note of admiration for the marvelous ar

terial system, where belt, shaft, and pulley convey the tremendous force to the members beyond, the visitor moves on to the carding-room, where the lint is torn to pieces by a series of combs and cleaned of all dust and other foreign matter. Next he follows the fiber to the spinning-room, where it is drawn out and twisted into a coarse, loose thread, and then, through successive stages of twisting and combing, into harder, closer, and stronger thread, until the "yarn is ready for the dye-vats. When duly seasoned into color, the hanks of yarn are passed around heated drums until they are dried. The looms are then ready for them, and the visitor watches in dumb fascination the play of the lifelike shuttle through the web, and the steady evolution of daintily patterned gingham or zephyr.

From the weaving-room he still follows the cotton, now a fabric, and the finishing-room is the next department. Here the cloth is passed through vats of "sizing," which is in brief a sort of starch. Drying again around drums succeeds the starching, and finally a process of glazing or polishing, before it is automatically measured, and at the same time folded into bolts.

Last stage of all, the warehouse or shippingroom, whence it will emerge, perhaps to be made into neat shirts and tidy dresses for the very farmer's lads and lasses who cultivated and gathered the cotton or wove it into cloth; perhaps, on the other hand, to be fashioned into the uncouth garments of the far-away Celestial.

IT

T is recognized by American manufacturers that, if they are to meet the manifold demands made upon textile art in the creation of novel, beautiful, and attractive fabrics, it must be by brains educated for the special work. America has to go to the Old World for her decorative art. Apropos of this, President Theodore Search, of the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, says: "With consummate energy and skill we have developed the commercial and trading side of our industries; but there remains a tremendous hiatus between the office and the loom, which has seldom been successfully bridged. We must have designers who not only know how to repeat a design made by somebody else, but who are able to originate designs that are artistic in the highest sense of the term." To which Principal E. W. France, of the same school, adds the weight of his valuable testimony: "It is not, after all, on the side of science that our industrial needs are most important to-day; it is upon the side of art. It is in matters of taste that we need training the most; it is the artistic element that constitutes the charin of textile productions and enables the good goods to hold the market. No amount of cheapening of processes can compensate for the absence of this quality, and no amount of merely technical education or mechanical skill can supply this want. . . . The product of the foreign looms has found and is finding a market in our midst, not because it is cheaper, but because it is more beautiful; and it is more beautiful, not because of the employment of better machinery or more economical methods of production, but because its character is determined by a finer taste."

Systematic textile instruction, consequently, is now considered necessary to improve the manufacture and encourage the production of those goods on which there is the greatest margin of profit, because of the artistic skill necessary for their manufacture. Furthermore, the textile school is now looked upon as essential to provide intelligent management for textile factories, and to apply systematic methods and precision to the textile industrial arts.

Textile education is just at the initial stage in this country. Several institutions have been started, among them the textile schools at Philadelphia and at Lowell, Mass. The latest is that opened in November last at New Bedford, Mass.

CHRISTOPHER P. BROOKS.

(Managing Director New Bedford Textile School.)

aging director, Christopher P. Brooks, a member of the Permanent Bureau of the International Congress on Technical Education, of which the headquarters are at Paris. Professor Brooks had previously planned and set in operation the textile school at Lowell. Later he inaugurated the American Correspondence School of Textiles, which has students in every manufacturing State of the Union, in Canada, England, and India, and which he conducts conjointly with the management of the New Bedford school. Professor Brooks' high professional capacity and ripe experience in the superintendence and equipment. of mills have constituted him a forceful factor in the development of textile training in America. The textile world and the yarn market recog

The

nize New Bedford as the home of fine cotton yarns. With but one exception (Fall River), it is the largest cotton-manufacturing city in the country, its spindles numbering 1,282,332 and its looms 23,610. Both geographically and climatically the natural conditions favor the industry by excelling in that degree of humidity which is essential to fine yarn spinning. foresight and wisdom of local manufacturers have given textile instruction a great impetus in this fine school. The Massachusetts statute of 1895 provided for the establishment of textile schools under State patronage in any city of the commonwealth whose mayor would certify, before July 1 of that year, that there were 450,000 spindles in operation within its boundaries. Among those who took an active part in securing this legislation were leading New Bedford manufacturers. Immediately upon the pas sage of the bill the necessary corporation of citizens was formed, including Mayor David L. Parker, Philip Y. De Normandie, N. B. Kerr, Robert Burgess, William J. Kent, Isaac R. Tompkins, William W. Crapo, George R. Stetson, Rufus A. Soule, Charles O. Brightman, Samuel J. Smith, Jonathan Howland, Jr., Lemuel Holmes, Samuel Ross, George W. Hillman, John Wilkinson, and Oliver Prescott, Jr., with George E. Briggs president. The school now stands as a monument to the enterprise and energy of these men. Its highest claim at the present time upon the attention of the American people is that as the first building exclusively designed and erected for a textile school in

America it stands as a model, and that as representative of an educational work of supreme value it is highly significant and suggestive.

In a general way the New Bedford institution has been well characterized as a cotton-mill with a schoolhouse front. Of the old colonial style of architecture carried out in brick and stone, it is dignified, symmetrical, and substantial. The front of the big building for thirty feet is, on all three floors, a school fully equipped. The rear is a cotton-mill on a small but complete scale. Appreciating the advantages of having the future

mill men of New England familiar with their machinery, it was policy on the part of manufacturers to donate and install samples of their machines. Consequently, everything that was required in the way of equipment was contributed, bringing the cost of the fine structure, inclusive of land, well within $25,000, though representing a value of fully $75,000. As the corporation had an appropriation of $25,000 from the State and an equal sum from the city, it still has working capital for future expansion.

The textile school is an educational institution where instruction is given, either in the day or evening, in the spinning, weaving, dyeing, bleaching, and printing of textiles or textile fibers and in the designing of patterns. best form it combines theory and practice. The teaching of a thing is made to illustrate the prac

A CLASS IN HAND-LOOM WEAVING.

In its

tice, and the teaching of the practice is directed to the acquisition of the theory. For such teaching a sufficient supply of apparatus is a first requisite; but the machinery in the textile school, as may be apprehended, is used with different objects and intention from that of the factory. Every machine of consequence to the cottonspinning industry is to be found here, so that the New Bedford institution stands as a sort of museum of appliances pertaining to textile art. The problem of equipment which Professor Brooks had to overcome is understood when it is

A DESIGNING CLASS IN SESSION.

known that in a space about one-twentieth of the area of a regular cotton-mill is given opportunity for practicing every process and studying every type of machine for cotton manufacturing that the student is apt to meet in after life. Every machine had to be made especially for this building, that it might contain all the essential features, yet in smaller space than a mill. The completeness and compactness of the plant are noteworthy.

The New Bedford institution carries on systematic textile training in six courses. It offers two-year courses in cotton manufacturing, in designing, and in mill engineering. It also offers one-year courses for weaving mill and yarn-mill superintendents and for dry-goods commission

It has

teen years of age. been found necessary to impose a fee on non-residents of the State, which is materially decreased for residents, in the day classes. In order that the advantages of the school may be made available by local mill operatives, evening sessions, duplicating the day courses, and in sections, are held four evenings each week with nominal fees. The evening department also provides facilities for practically free education to those who cannot be expected to defray the whole cost of their textile education.

In the textile school the pupil, having qualified in the ordinary school branches, studies everything pertaining to the manufacture of woven fabrics. In his first year he devotes his attention to mechanism and machine drawing, warp preparation, plain and fancy weaving, and hand-loom work. The second year's study embraces cotton-picking, carding, combing and spinning, and mill engineering. In addition, for reasons already made clear, the two-year course is taken up largely with design and its applications.

A visit to the weaving-room holds most fascination to the art lover and to him who believes that the true province of any technical school should never be subordinated to the teaching of a trade. Apropos of this, the director of one of the most famous textile schools abroad once said to visitors: "Pray do not call this a weavingschool; it is a school of art applied to weaving.' The element of beauty which is required for the finer products of the loom means training in art for the men and women workers in the textile industries of the future.

At the New Bedford school, consequently, original designing is given every possible stimulus.

The process of application follows, for the

designs are then woven by their inventors at individual looms. In the interesting work of producing the pattern in the woven fabric the freehand sketch is first redrawn on squared paper adjusted to the possibilities of weaving, each square representing a thread. A skillful workman prepares cards according to the design by punching in them definite sets of holes. These perforated cards afterward suppress or release the individual wires of the Jacquard. loom, very much as the perforated disk in a music-box produces the desired air.

Most people have only a vague idea of the workings of the loom. One watches with fascination the movement of the harnesses" as they dexterously raise one

set of threads and lower the alternate set, thus opening a V-shaped shed through which the shuttle shoots. The shuttle in its passage pays out the filling, which with the threads at right angles to it form the warp and woof of the fabric. The harnesses govern the rise and fall of the warp threads, so that these appear on the surface in the prearranged pattern. In the primitive loom the warp threads are controlled in gangs by their harnesses. In the Jacquard loom each thread is lowered or raised individually by a wire corresponding in action to a harness, the possibilities of the loom being limited only by the skill of the weaver and the excellence of the design. About fifteen types of looms, all different, but arranged for convenience in practice to use warps of the same width, are part of the installation of the New Bedford school. Among them are the Whitin, Mason, Crompton & Knowles, Kilburn & Lincoln, Draper, English, and Jacquard looms. They are hung up to weave sateens, dimities, lawns, plain sheetings, box welt, table-cloth, Bedford cord, satin stripes, ginghams, print cloths, worsted dress goods, and toweling.

The earlier processes of carding and spinning are taught the second year. The card-room has a section for spinning. More properly this apartment might be called a yarn-mill; for in this one room, less than 70 feet square, the cotton is brought from its raw state up to a finished yarn, ready for weaving. A knowledge of the

delicate, intricate, and fascinating operation of cotton manufacturing is acquired in the carding and spinning processes, by which the cotton fibers, after being picked," are laid out all in one direction, absolutely parallel, into a thin film, and that film twisted into a thread ready to be woven-all done with such nicety by the varied machinery that in perfect yarn every yard of yarn, or roving, or thread will weigh exactly the same number of grains with every other yard in a given lot and number. The pupil here learns to manipulate three processes of picking, three types of cards (all English style, but of American manufacture), three kinds of drawingframes, the ribbon lapper, the comber, the rail

A LESSON IN POWER-LOOM WEAVING.

way head, four processes of fly frames, the spinning-mules, two types of ring spinning-frames, and the wet and dry twister. The instruction is directed largely to an elucidation of the principles of construction and operation characteristic of each machine. The second year's course also includes the science of mill construction and management, with every practical detail of textile statistics, cost, methods, markets, and varieties of goods, and advanced mechanism, or machine drawing, and designing, covering the art of color as applied to fabrics, the contrast and harmony of colors, and jacquard designing. Opportunity is afforded for advanced academic studies concurrently with those in the textile school and for the study of chemistry and dyeing at a neighboring free institute.

The textile school is representative of the true