As has been said, it was customary for weavers to make the warp on their looms at one place, and the spinners to furnish the yarns for the weft from their homes, and even after the spinning machines were invented the spinning and weaving were done at separate places. It remained for Francis C. Lowell of Boston, who had been studying the art of spinning and weaving in England and Scotland and the inventions of Arkwright and Crompton, to establish in 1813 at Waltham, Mass., with the aid of Paul Moody, machinist, the first factory in the world wherein were combined under one roof all the processes for converting cotton into cloth. The task of the century in this art has been to greatly extend the dominion of machinery in the treatment of cotton and wool in all stages, from the reception of the raw material at the door of the factory to its final completion in the form of the choicest cloth, and to increase the capacity of machines sufficiently to meet an ever-increasing and enormous consumption. There are from twenty to forty separate and distinct operations performed both in spinning and weaving and the completion of a piece of cloth from cotton or wool, and nearly all of these operations are accomplished by machinery. The century’s improvements and inventions in machines for treating and spinning cotton comprise machines for first opening and tearing the matted mass apart as it is taken from the bales, then cleaning, carding, drawing, roving, stretching, spinning, winding, doubling, dressing, warping, weaving, etc. Formerly, the opening machines were simply cylinders armed with spikes, to which the cotton was led through nipping rollers, and then delivered in a loose, fluffy condition. When such a machine was associated with a blowing machine to blow out the dust and cleanse the fibre, the loose and scattered condition in which the cotton was left gave rise to a great danger from fire, and destructive fires often occurred. The object of the later opening machinery is to confine the cotton within a casing in its passage through the machine, during which passage it is thoroughly stretched, beaten and blown and then rolled into a continuous sheet or lap. At the same time, by nice devices, it is evened, that is, freed from all knots, and made of uniform thickness, while a certain quantity only of cotton of known weight is allowed to pass through to constitute the required lap. Finally the lap is wound upon a roller, which when filled is removed to the carder. Although the cotton is now a white, soft, clean, downy sheet, still the fibres cross each other in every direction, and they require to be straightened and laid parallel before the spinning. This is done by carding. Paul, Hargreaves, Robert Peel, and Arkwright had worked in constructing a machine to take the place of hand carding, and it was finally reduced by Arkwright, towards the close of the 18th century, to its present form and principle.