Pennington, William

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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ft. 1750 England

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English patentee of a machine for making holes in the leather backing used for card clothing.

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Prior to the spinning process, the raw cotton or wool must be prepared. One stage of the preparation is carding, in which the mass of fibres is drawn out and disentangled before being rolled up into a sliver or rollrag. At first natural teazels were mounted on boards. The wool was caught round their hooks and pulled out as the hand cards were drawn across each other. It is not known when iron wire hooks inserted through a leather backing were substituted for teazels, but in 1750 William Pennington took out a patent, for a machine to make the holes in the leather backing so that the bent wires could be inserted more easily and more regularly. Soon after this a machine for making the complete card clothing was made by Robert Kay.

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Bibliography

1750, British patent no. 657.

Further Reading

R.L.Hills, 1970, Power in the Industrial Revolution, Manchester (includes a brief account of the development of card-clothing machines).

RLH