highly developed machinery for spinning cotton, wool, and flax has
grown to be so much a part of our conception of modern life, as
contrasted with the times of our grandfathers, as often to lead to the
feeling that a complete and universal change has occurred in all the
textile industries. This is, however, not the case. There is one great
textile industry--one of the most staple and valuable--still in the
primitive condition of former times, and employing processes and
apparatus essentially the same as those known and employed before such
development 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