The museum was in two parts with the ground floor being an interesting exhibition of contemporary fabrics from Japan and with the first floor being an exhibition of the sort of machinery which was around when the mill was up and running. Including a stuffed and rather oddly shaped sheep: it seems that the land roundabout was not much good for arable farming and so was used for sheep, although not to the extent that the mill did not rely on wool imported from Australia.
The large machine in the illustration is a contraption for sewing together narrow strips of carpet to make something more like our modern broadloom. We thought about how one might bring such a thing back into production, at least to the extent of giving demonstrations from time to time. Requirement one would be for a person who liked tinkering with machines - perhaps a retired farmer or a retired motorbike enthusiast - and who had the skills & tools needed to make the various parts which would no doubt be missing. Enthusiastic enough to work out how the thing worked in the absence of both manual and working machine. Requirement two would be for a sufficient supply of narrow strips of carpet to make a convincing demonstration. Alternatively, the wife of said enthusiast could be recruited to unpick the product of each demonstration in time for the next. We will continue to review our acquaintance for candidates. But it would be fun to see such a thing working.
It occurred to us when we got home that modern sheets, particularly the large ones favoured by hotels, could not possibly have been woven on the sort of looms available in cottages, the sort of thing that might have been used by the likes of Silas Marner. BH thought that two or more strips of sheeting might have been sewn together lengthwise, by hand, to make a completed sheet. Developing the thought, making large sheets of a fine material like silk by hand must have been prodigiously expensive. Developing further, one might meditate on the transformation of messy wads of cotton fibres into something close to a plane surface, a mathematical entity; a transformation from disorder to order. See http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/10/fluff.html.
Another machine included a pre-cursor of the punched card. The punched card was a steel plate, about one inch by two, with four hole positions. The punch cards were arranged on a short chain, rather like the caterpillar track of a tank and on each throw of the shuttle the chain was advanced by one link. Then, by means of a mechanical train which I was not able to sort out in the time available, the deal was that when the hole was present, the corresponding shaft (along with its heddles. See google to find out what these things are. Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heddle.) was raised. And so the pattern encoded into the punched card was woven into the fabric.
There were also a large spinning wheel and a couple of hand looms, with these last being in a fit state for demonstrations and we wondered whether four was some kind of a magic number for the number of shafts. Setting up shafts was clearly an expensive business and so one would not gratuitously add to their number. But what sort of patterns could one weave with five shafts that one could not weave with four? I associate to the cellular automata described by Stephen Wolfram in his book about a new kind of science. Could his Mathematica program do the business for me?
One rather sad exhibit appeared to have been abandoned with the operator not bothering to clean it down of whatever it was doing when it was turned off. It looked as if he or she had just powered the thing down, maybe cut off the completed cloth and walked away, leaving the machine, the uncompleted cloth, the bobbins and so on and so forth to rust down, neglected in some shed. A sad end to a fine bit of engineering.
Almonte was interesting in part because, like both Watertown and Tupperlake, it was a town which had lost its founding industry, although in this case that was textiles rather than lumber. In size more like Tupperlake than Watertown and successful in that the interesting main street included a respectable selection of antique & household object shops. Maybe now a commuter town rather than a working town.
Reference 1: http://mvtm.ca/mvtm/.
Reference 2: https://www.wolframscience.com/.
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