OKAY SO. FINALLY. I HAVE PROPERLY (ish) MET THE WEIRD SPINNING WHEEL
*AND CRACKED SOME OF ITS SECRETS*
(loooong post ahead, click to unfold at your own risk)
INTRO
Welcome to Daelf's most involved rambling about old tools so far :D
So, in august, friends who are rarely around were coming to Paris, so we planned a guided group visit of the Arts & Métiers museum (meaning "crafts & professions"— it's all about technology, from the transformation of materials to communication and data, to the purification and precise measurement of scientific elements, to going to space, and also they have a Foucault pendulum and fun vehicles.) Great! We'd never been there!
I loved it from the start, but *then* we got to the first ~textile~ room and OH. MY. GOD. so many semi-automated looms, and strange shuttles, and… ONE spinning wheel? huh. I get closer to it, and it looks… Weird. I am instantly obsessed, but the guide is moving on, so i can't do much about it… YET.
Fast forward a couple weeks. Our son Perco is coming back from summer camp, I have to go pick him up from the train station and then we have to wait for a few hours until Fifo arrives with the car so we can all get home with the *enormous* suitcase and assorted Stuff. … Hey, why not put all that in the lockers at the station, and go to that museum you didn't see because you were away at the time, and yeah, don't worry about the thing i want to see more closely, it's fiiiine :] … i spent like twenty minutes *just* in that room, taking as many pictures as i could, before Perco literally dragged me away because we were running out of time -_-° IT WAS NOT ENOUGH. OBSESSION HAD ONLY INTENSIFIED.
I mean, look at that. what the *heck* is going on.
So, a few days later, having found nothing in the online data about the museum collection, I phoned them to ask about it, ended up exchanging a few mails with the lady curating the Materials section… but her specialty is glass working, not yarn related at all, so she offered to invite me to see the thing *out of its casing* on a day the museum is closed to visitors, and HECK YES PLEASE OMG
It was planned for december 1st, and (sparing you the logistic details) early in the afternoon, I was there with my mom, who had helped me get there with my own spinning wheel.
THE WEIRD WHEEL
sadly, we were not able to take the wheel completly outside, because (as you can see in the first pic above) it's linked to a distaff by a length of combed wool, and the distaff is fastened to the wall, so we were not going to touch that. BUT. no glass.
So.
What is "wrong" with this wheel? "well it has only one pedal…" yes ma'am, but that's. normal, actually ^^° Modern wheels have two because it's more comfy, that's all.
no. it has a tiny bobin that's impossible to take off from the flyer, and in direct contact to the wheel itself, which means no tention adjustment. why.
but also, a very ingenious system, moving the yarn as it is spun so that the bobin is evenly and automatically filled!
in addition to that, there's a yarn swift to the side, with a complicated string-and-pulley mechanism… and between that and the wheel, a missing part, broken. (the vice in the background also seems to do nothing, so there might be a missing part there too.)
so…
… what to make of all this? especially in contrast with the demonstration I did with my own wheel, and all the talking of being able (well, having the *potential ability*…) to make pretty much any yarn I could want with it, it's clear this one was the opposite: make One Specific Yarn, but easily and fast, with All The Steps on One Tool. Not sure how the string and pulley bits worked, but they were a way to use the wheel to spin it instead of the flyer without having to do more than tightening a thing specifically for it. I suggested that the missing part(s) helped with getting the yarn on the swift, and the swift was there because the rigid nature of the 'fill bobin easily with very regular yarn' meant you couldn't fill it much before tension needed adjusting, and everything else meant that you *couldn't adjust tension* because the whole point of this model was predictavility and regularity.
And that's all very cool, but a bit frustrating that the lil blurb under the wheel didn't specify anything but "spinning wheel with yarn swift", dating it even more vaguely to "sometime before 1840". And that was it.
And I realized I'd forgotten to ask the lady to give me the restoration notes she had pulled from the archives, but she had also mentionned something else we (I) could look up…
THE PATENT
At first I was like. Wait. What? But OF COURSE there would be a patent for something weird like this made in the early 19th century! The industrial revolution!! All I'd needed was the suggestion that such a patent existed, and the information that a public archive website listed All Of Them.
So I looked. And came up with nothing about spinning wheels: all the machines were after, like, 1855. But then I realized there was *another* archive, for older patents, from before they were all numbered!
… And I found it.
I FOUND IT.
I haven't had the spoons to read *everything* yet (because, o boi, the cursive, and the *spelling*… it might as well be not-french to me)(yes, if you didn't get it yet, i'm french so the langue itself is not a problem, but. WELP) A few notes though!
I didn't need to read everything to know it's the right one because a/ it has schematics of the flyer (*only* the flyer though :/ ) and the description of the parts describes the motion of the yarn guide doing its work, so even though some parts are not clearly visible or a little different, clearly, this essential part of the machine is THE thing they wanted to file a patent on, and it's the same mechanism I found on the wheel at the musem
b/ at the very start, the authors of the thing explain why they did this, and as I deducted, it's mostly Time. But also saving up fibers and bits of yarn? I get how having one person do everything could save time (they apparently even did Tests, and mention Numbers on how much time was saved) but i don't know enough about the procedures of the time to get how fiber was saved. ah well. It definitely was important, though, because they specifically mention silk in the list of fibers it can be used for!
c/ I had NO idea how incredible it would feel to see a mystery object, have questions about it, get to answer them by looking at it up close (at least closer than a regular visitor of the museum can), discuss it with a professionnal who knew nothing about this specific tool but still A Lot about the textile industry at the time, formulate hypothesis about the Why of the Weird, and then *have them confirmed* by *finding the patent its inventors filed about it because they were super proud of themselves* (quite right, too!)
It was great. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I'll try and go read the rest of the patent to see if there are more interesting details, but it might take a while… Si quelqu'un y arrive avant moi, n'hésitez pas à détourner ce post :3
