Open-End Spinning

Open-end spinning, also called rotor spinning, is a yarn-production method that eliminates the traditional spindle, instead feeding carded sliver directly into a small, extremely fast-spinning rotor that twists it into yarn and winds the finished yarn onto a bobbin in one continuous operation. The German engineer Julius Meimberg patented rotor spinning in 1949, and the Cotton Research Institute in Usti nad Orlici, Czechoslovakia, developed the concept into the first practical industrial machine, the KS200, by 1965; the British firm Courtaulds secretly installed the first machines outside Czechoslovakia in 1967. A modern rotor can spin at up to 140,000 revolutions per minute, roughly seven times the speed of conventional ring spinning, and the process eliminates several separate preparatory steps that ring spinning requires, though the resulting yarn is generally coarser, fuzzier, and less durable than ring-spun yarn because its fibers are less tightly aligned.