Carding Machine

Carding is the mechanical process, and the machine that performs it, that disentangles, cleans and intermixes fibers using moving surfaces covered in wire card clothing, straightening the fibers and combing them roughly parallel so they can be spun into yarn. The earliest known carding devices are bow-instruments called kaman and dhunaki, used in India from around the second century CE, which loosened fiber using a vibrating string. Lewis Paul of Birmingham invented two hand-driven carding machines in 1748, the second fitted with wire slips wrapped around a rotating cylinder, and Daniel Bourn patented a similar machine the same year and used it at his Leominster spinning mill until it burned down in 1754; Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton later refined carding machinery further, and by the 1780s mechanized carding was established in mills across northern England and Wales, before James Walton's 1834 wire-and-rubber card design became the industry standard.