Cotton Thread

The cotton mill is a type of factory that was created to house spinning and weaving machinery. The first cotton mill was built in 1771 in Cromford, Derbyshire, England by Richard Arkwright. more...

The first cotton mill in the United States was in Lowell, Massachusetts, and built by Francis Cabot Lowell, who traveled to Manchester, England to study its mill system and memorized their construction.

Processing the cotton

Cotton mills get the cotton shipped to them in large, 500 pound bales. When the cotton comes out of a bale, it is all packed together and still contains vegetable matter. In order to fluff up the cotton and remove the vegetable matter, the cotton is sent through a picker. A picker looks similar to the carding machine and the cotton gin, but is slightly different. The cotton is fed into the machine and gets beaten with a beater bar, to loosen it up. The cotton then collects on a screen and gets fed through various rollers, which serve to remove the vegetable matter.

The cotton comes off of the picking machine in large bats, and is then taken to carding machines. The carders line up the fibres nicely to make them easier to spin. The carding machine consists mainly of one big roller with smaller ones surrounding it. All of the rollers are covered in small teeth, and as the cotton progresses further on the teeth get finer (i.e. closer together). The cotton leaves the carding machine in the form of a sliver; a large rope of fibres.

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