elopment had taken place. We mean the art of silk reeling. The
improvements made in the production of threads of all other materials
have only been applied to silk in the minor processes for utilizing
waste; but the whole silk trade and manufacture of the world has, up
to this time, been dependent for its raw silk threads upon apparatus
which, mechanically speaking, is nearly or quite as primitive as the
ancient spinning wheels. Thousands of operatives are constantly
employed in forming up these threads by hand, adding filament by
filament to the thread as required, while watching the unwinding from
the cocoon of many miles of filament in order to produce a single
pound of the raw silk thread, making up the thread unaided by any
mechanical device beyond a simple reel on which the thread is wound as
finished, and a basin of heated water in which the cocoons are placed.

Viewed from any standpoint to which we are accustomed, this state of
things is so remarkable that we are naturally led to the belief that
there must be some special causes which tended to retard the
introduction of automatic machinery, and these are not far to seek.
The spinning machinery employed for the production of threads, other
than those of raw silk, may be broadly described as consisting of
devices capable of taking a mass of confused and comparatively short
fibers, laying them parallel with one another, and twisting them into
a cylindrical thread, depending for its strength upon the friction and
interlocking of these constituent fibers.

This process is radically different from that employed to make a
thread of raw silk, which consists of filaments, each several thousand
feet long, laid side by side, almost without twist, and glued together
into a solid thread by means of the "gum" or glue with which each
filament is naturally coated. If this radical difference be borne in
mind, but very little mechanical knowledge is required to make it
evident that the principle of spinning machinery in general is utterly
unsuited to the making up of the threads of raw silk. Since spinning
machinery, as usually constructed for other fibers, could not be
employed in the manufacture of raw silk, and as the countries where
silk is produced are, generally speaking, not the seat of great
mechanical industries, where the need of special machinery would be
quickly recognized and supplied, silk reeling (the making of raw silk)
has been passed by, and has never become