Silk Reeling Machine

A silk reeling machine unwinds the fine continuous filament from silkworm cocoons and winds several filaments together onto a reel to form a usable thread, a process traditionally done by hand in China for thousands of years. Water-powered mechanical silk reeling mills, called filande, were established in the Piedmont region of northern Italy from the eighteenth century onward, mechanizing what had been a cottage industry. Japan mechanized silk reeling on an industrial scale during the Meiji era, most famously at the government-built Tomioka Silk Mill, which opened in 1872 using steam-powered reeling machinery and French reeling technology and became a model for Japan's later industrialization of the silk trade.