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 an industrial art. It
remained one of the few manual handicrafts, while yet serving as the
base of a great and staple industry of worldwide importance.

There is every reason to suppose that we are about to witness a
transformation in the art of silk reeling, a change similar to that
which has already been brought about in the spinning of other threads,
and of which the consequences will be of the highest importance. For
some years past work has been done in France in developing an
automatic silk-reeling machine, and incomplete notes concerning it
have from time to time been published. That the accounts which were
allowed to reach the outer world were incomplete will cause no
surprise to those who know what experimental work is--how easily and
often an inventor or pioneer finds himself hampered by premature