Not Necessarily Shoddy – What Every New Jersey Chemist Should Know About the Marvelous Science Between the Sheep and the Sweater.

This essay originally appeared the March 2007 issue of the Indicator, the news magazine of the North jersey Section of the American Chemical Society.

How many hours do you work in order to afford a good quality wool jacket?

Taking the mean salary for a person in New Jersey, 50,000$ per year and supposing the same average person works 49 weeks annually at eight hours a day gives an hourly rate of 25$ and since a typical good quality jacket is about 250$, the average New Jersey worker toils just over one day.

This was not the case for most of human history.

Consider the case of an unidentified woman from New Fairfield, Connecticut, who in October of 1770 worked at her spinning wheel for 12 hours. She produced 126 skeins of worsted yarn or about 560 linear yards. This might have been enough for one small size jacket but there was a lot more work involved. It started with raising and shearing the sheep, preparing the wool for spinning, and finally weaving the finished yarn into cloth that would be hand-sewn into finished clothing.

Such marathon spinning sessions were not the usual custom in Connecticut. By 1770 the American Colonies and Great Britain were already locked in the political and economic struggles that would eventually lead to the revolution. This housewife was making a point about being free from reliance on imported British textiles. (Or perhaps she made just the opposite point?)

Given the huge amounts of labor required to produce any sort of textile, it is not surprising that this activity was one of the first to be brought out of the home and into an industrial setting. And as all readers of the Indicator know well, where there is industry, there is chemistry.

Since wool comes from sheep, we will start there.

Writing in 1698 Gabriel Thomas reported that sheep in western New Jersey were abundant and that the animals were ≥naturally very sound≤ and largely free of diseases and external parasites. As the number of sheep increased throughout the state there were a number of laws passed to protect them and return strays to their owners. In the late 1700πs Newark and other towns imposed taxes on dogs as a means of discouraging animals that might prey on sheep. Eventually monies collected from these taxes were used to compensate people whose sheep had been attacked by dogs.

As valuable as they were, there seems to have been no systematic efforts to improve New Jersey sheep until after 1800. Modern sheep breeds are largely the descendents of the Spanish Merino. Spanish herders routinely moved their flocks up to 400 miles between winter pastures in the southern part of the country and their summer pastures in the northern mountains. This annual migration produced a very hardy animal and good breeding made it one whose wool was both abundant and soft.

Merinos were so vital to the Spanish wool industry that the exporting them from the country was punishable by death. But as most of Europeπs royalty was related to Spanish royal family, gifts of Merino sheep were made to many courts. Other nations were less punctilious and relied on animals smuggled through Portugal. By whatever means, Merinos began leaving Spain in the mid 1700s and by the end of the century were found in Saxony, Hungary, England, France, and even Australia.

Merinos were first brought to New Jersey by Dr. James Mease of Philadelphia. Dr. Mease placed two imported rams on a farm in Gloucester County. The DuPont family received gifts of Merino sheep from the Spanish government in 1812 and eventually had one of the best herds in the United States. The first meeting of the Merino Society of the Middle States was held on the farm of James Caldwell near Haddonfield, New Jersey, in 1811. Caldwell had been raising Merinos since 1806 and at the meeting some 200 to 300 pure breed merinos were on exhibit. By 1815, New Jersey had a total of 234,361 sheep of which 3,807 were Merinos.

The attention paid to Merinos soon inspired attempts to promote more systematic breeding. Starting in the 1820πs county agricultural societies started offering prizes for the best sheep and best wool goods. Twenty years earlier, in 1798, Newark had decided to spend its dog tax revenues on promoting sheep husbandry and offered cash prizes for the most wool produced.

Whatever the sheepπs breed, its wool coat has one purpose, to protect it from the elements. Wool fibers are keratin, as they emerge from the follicles they are overlaid with lanolin from the skinπs sebaceous glands. The ducts from these glands open directly into the follicle.

The wool fiber itself consists of overlapping scales with the cell matter inside them. This outer layer is resistant to wetting but water vapor will be absorbed by the fibers. A wool fiber can absorb up to 1/3 of its own weight in moisture without any detriment. This is why wool worn next to the skin will help remove perspiration from the body. The adsorption of water vapor is also accompanied by the liberation of heat. This is why wet wool has such a strong odor, the heat vaporizes oils from the sheep. (or Janet Ambrose of Syracuse University explains it, "If you wear one of those Irish wool sweaters, you'll smell sheep.'') On the plus side, the slow absorption of water vapor and the release of heat provides a thermal buffer that contributes to keeping the wearer warm, especially when moving from a warm, dry environment into a cold, wet one.

Lanolin is the waxy covering of wool fibers. Although it is called ≥wool fat≤ and ≥wool grease≤ technically lanolin is a wax since the esters (typically 18 to 26 carbon atoms) contain no glycerin in combination with the fatty acids. Lanolinπs primary purpose is to waterproof the sheep but it also has anti-fungal and antibacterial properties.

After shearing, the wool fibers are sorted. The shorter and courser fibers are used for blankets, carpets, and other cloth where texture is not important. Longer and thinner fibers are used for worsted cloth that is easier to wear because it is finer and lighter. (Just remember, the worsted is the bestest.)

The first step of wool preparation is scouring, which removes the lanolin. In the pre-industrial period scouring was done on the farm using alkali soaps. Years of experimentation by European wool producers showed that the best results were obtained with alkali soaps that were made using the ashes of burned kelp. The mixture of salts found in the marine environment made a superior soap.

The problem was that there were not enough ashes in all of Europe to make enough soap to keep pace with the growing textile production. Americans began exporting wood ash in the 1700s and this activity continued until French chemists introduced methods for converting sodium chloride to sodium carbonate in the 1790s. Freeing soap production from dependence on biological sources of alkalis was the start of the heavy chemical industry.

As the process industrialized the scouring mill used a series of washing vats so that as the wool was moved into progressively cleaner environments. For laboratory scale scouring, the ASTM recommended a 0.1% soap solution with 0.3% sodium carbonate. The industrialization of scouring allowed for the recovery of large quantities of lanolin and expanded its use as an emollient for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. (Recipes using lanolin as an emollient go back well over 2000 years and the ancient Egyptians applied it to their heads by placing a lump of it on their skulls and allowing it to melt in the sun.)

At one time the city of Camden, New Jersey, was home to the largest wool scouring mill in the world. Located at South 3rd & Jackson Streets, the Eavenson & Levering plant was opened shortly after the firm moved from Philadelphia in 1906. Eavenson & Levering employed more than 500 production workers who processed 50,000,000 pounds of wool annually.

Between scouring and spinning the wool must be carded. This is a process of combing the fibers until they are straight and parallel to one another. After scouring and carding, the wool needs a small amount of oil to lubricate it before it is spun. Without this step, the fibers tend to break during spinning. Oiling also helps to discourage the build up of static electricity. Prior to World War II, animal oils like olein, lard, and neatsfoot oil were used in ordinary yarn spinning. But for the finer worsted yarns, vegetable oils, especially peanut and olive oil, were employed. Shortages of imported oils during the first and second world wars lead to the development of synthetics. Today mineral oils containing emulsifying agents are the industry standard.

Unsaturated fatty acids are not suited for wool oiling. Because they can be easily oxidized, certain oils such as cottonseed and soybean have been known to heat up and catch fire. The wastes from carding operations may contain up to 30% oil and present a dangerous fire hazard. Tiny bits of iron from the teeth of wool combs can co-catalyze rapid oxidation along with certain dyes. (Olive Drab dyes are particularly dangerous.)

In addition to their other problems, cheap and low-grade fatty acids are hard to remove from the carded wool and their presence can block the penetration of dyes into the fiber. (The oil can also turn rancid) Converting the fatty acids to soap can facilitate their removal. The addition of alkalis or ammonia can saponify (or neutralize) the fatty acids but this must be done carefully as the excess alkali can adversely affect the wool quality. An 1848 recipe calls for six ounces of sodium bicarbonate and two ounces of sodium chloride in one gallon of warm water to be added to wool carding oil.

If one reads the histories of the industrial revolution, it may seem that the textile industry spawned huge vertically integrated factories virtually overnight. The actual process was far more gradual. This was especially true in areas that were still rural, like much of New Jersey in the first half of the 1800πs.

Throughout the early 1800πs as machines became available, owners of grist mills and saw mills began branching out into wool processing. Farmers might bring wool to one or another specialized mills for a specific step in cloth production. Raw wool might be carded in one mill, brought back home for spinning, and brought to yet another mill for weaving. Other entrepreneurs branched out into dying or oiling, or fulling.

Wool garments produced in the home were said to be ≥homespun≤ and this word is still used to describe something that is simple and unpretentious. In 1810, 374,313 yards of woolen goods were produced in New Jersey homes. Sussex and Morris Counties lead the others producing 97,561 yards and 60,830 yards respectively. Essex County produced 43,000 yards. Bergen County, which at that time included most of present day Passaic County, produced the smallest amount, some 11,739 yards. Perhaps this was because Bergen County had excellent water and road transportation to New York and thus better access to imported textiles.

After 1840, the production of goods in New Jerseyπs homes dropped dramatically. The 1840 census lists the total value of all home produced goods at 201,625$, by 1850 this dropped to 110,705$, and was down to 22,226$ by 1860. Industrialization more than made up for the decline, in 1860, New Jerseyπs 35 woolen mills were consuming 1,712,000 pounds of wool annually.

Many New Jersey families during this period had a spinning wheel for every female member, wool cards, a dye vat or two, and a loom. (The primary responsibility for spinning fell to the eldest daughter which is why an older un-married daughter is still called a spinster by the politically incorrect.) Given the tremendous amount of labor involved, as well as the capital investment, not to mention the itching, it is no wonder that many people gave up homespun fabrics at the earliest opportunity.

The experience of the Smith-Terry family of Cape May County was typical of the period. During the 1850s they kept sheep and the mother washed, dyed, and spun a small percentage of the wool into yarn for knitting socks. Most of the familyπs wool was collected by a one Isaac Dubois who brought it to the East Lake Woolen Mills in East Bridgeton. It came back woven into cloth and blankets.

The alternative to weaving wool into cloth was to felt the material. Pressed felt is a fabric where the fibers are first assembled into a loose mat. Heat and pressure are applied to the mat causing the fibers to interlock. The production of woolen felts is beyond the scope of the present article but it should be noted that beaver fur, and other types of hats worn in the 1800s and into the 1900s were made from felted animal hairs.

The next physical - chemical process involved fulling the woven cloth. This process takes advantage of a property called felting, which is unique to Keratin fibers. When a group of these fibers is pressed together, the roots become permanently entangled with the other fibers and the resulting cloth tends to become heavier, thicker, firmer, and smoother, in a word, fuller. Oils that were added during spinning and any accumulated dirt were also washed out.

Wool fibers will not felt unless they are lubricated. They must slide along the path of least resistance but their scaly surface generates considerable friction so that no fulling will occur in air or a non-swelling solvent.

Alkaline soaps were commonly used for this process. Before mechanical equipment became available the cloth was soaked in warm soapy water and then beaten with sticks on a wooden floor. Afterwards the cloth might be placed in a stream and beaten again to wash out the last traces of soap.

Another option was to tread on the cloth. At a fulling bee the soapy cloth was placed in the center of a circle of barefoot young men and women who would kick it back and forth. The opportunities for flirting were not lost on the participants.

In the Middle Ages and in certain mills, urine was used as the fulling agent. The keratin proteinπs structure changes under alkaline conditions so the felting was enhanced. Naturally the fullerπs working conditions were extremely unpleasant. Aside from the heavy physical labor, fullers were constantly exposed to the odors of putrefied urine and any pathogens growing in it. By 1700 the diseases of fullers were already listed in the earliest handbooks of occupational safety and health.

The best fulling agent was then, and still is, Fullers Earth. It was widely used in the 1800s and replaced stale urine. Fullers Earth is a clay mineral that when mixed with water produces a sudsy, surfactant rich solution. No appreciable deposits are found in the northeastern United States and the material had to be imported from Europe. Today it is mined in the western and southeastern states.

Mechanical fulling mills were already operating in the Middle Ages and they were among the first mechanical textile processing operations built in New Jersey. As early as 1667 William Lawrence of Monmouth County was operating a fulling mill and in the same year John Ogden of Elizabeth constructed a sawmill that would eventually be converted to fulling. Historians believe that early fulling mills seldom employed more than a single fuller and one or two apprentices. Perhaps this is the reason that fullers are seldom mentioned in census documents and lists of colonial era tradesmen.

Fulling mills operated by using waterpower to raise heavy woolen mallets that would be dropped onto the cloth. In some European towns the fulling mill was made available to its neighbors as a laundry during slack times in cloth production. Later mills used a series of rollers squeeze the cloth as it was pulled through vats containing the fulling agents.

Because the fuller was the last person to handle the cloth, it was only logical that many of them branched out into the dye business.

In terms of the chemistry involved, wool dying was the most complex part of the process. Sometimes wool was dyed after spinning and before weaving. This resulted in a garment that was more uniform in color. The thoroughness of the process gave our language the expression ≥dyed in the wool.≤

Prior to the explosion of synthetic dyes in the late 1800s, most wool dyes could be broadly divided into two categories, mordant and fast. Fast dyes were those that bound directly to cloth and would ≥hold fast.≤ It was hard to wash them away and they generally resisted fading and rubbing off. Mordant dyes were those requiring the wool be pre-treated with a metal salt (usually a sulfate) if the dyes were to ≥bite.≤ Although the word mordant came from a French word meaning ≥to bite,≤ this is not an accurate description of the process.

A mordant is usually a metallic salt having an affinity for both the dye and the fiber. They combine in the fiber to form a ≥lake≤ or insoluble precipitate. Mordants used for wool are, alum, potassium bichromate, iron sulphate, tin crystals (stannous chloride), and cream of tartar. Because handling of the mordant can change the shade of the dye, mordant dyes are classified by a Colour Index where the dye is named according to both the mordant and base color.

To deposit a metal ion on the fiber, most dyers soaked the fabric in a hot solution of mordant. The fabric was then transferred to another vat for the dying. The dyestuff itself is a large organic anion bound to sodium cation. In the dye vat the sodium is lost and the anion forms an insoluble complex with the metal ion.

Copperas (ferrous sulfate) was obtained from iron pyrites and this material was used both as a mordant and an additive that would alter the colors of produced by the botanical dyes. Readers from Morris County might be familiar with Copperas Mountain in Rockaway Township, which was mined for both magnetite iron ore and iron pyrites during the 1800s. Alum (aluminum sulfate) was another popular mordant although there were few deposits in the United States. It was not produced commercially in this country until after 1811.

Natural dyes available in New Jersey would have included indigo (blue), madder (red), logwood (used to turn woolens a rich navy blue), cochineal (scarlet), and woad (blue, or green after some modification.) In the years prior to 1850, the dyers palette had 32 natural reds, 3 natural blues, 5 natural greens, and 6 natural blacks.

After dying the cloth needed to dry so that it was stretched over a tent-like wooden frame and hooked into place. The hooks used for holding the cloth were called ≥tenterhooks≤ which has been corrupted to ≥tenderhooks≤ when used to describe being kept waiting while in a nervous state.

The astute reader will have noticed that after 3200 words, we have only reached the point where the cloth is ready for the tailor or the seamstress.

The history of tailoring and dressmaking is an entirely separate story but it should be noted that the costs of new clothes made them inaccessible to all but the relatively affluent. Before the era of mass-produced clothes in the late 1800πs, a poor person might never own a suit of new clothes and an average middle class person would have seldom been able to purchase a new suit. For many upwardly mobile immigrants, owning their first set of newly manufactured ≥American≤ clothes was an important step in the process of assimilation. For the poor and the downwardly mobile, a lively market in second hand clothes persisted well into the twentieth century.

Wool became one of the first recycled materials to reach a large market. Scraps of fabric, loose fibers, and other wastes were gathered up, shredded and re-spun. This re-working often took place in a specialized factory called a shoddy mill. The resulting fibers were shorter and the cloth made from them was of an inferior quality. The cloth was called shoddy and despite its name, it is still being manufactured today. (Recall that the name is properly used to describe cloth made from recycled fibers and today many shoddy goods are actually quite high quality.)

Until the Civil War the word was a noun and not an adjective. The huge demand for uniforms caused many unscrupulous manufacturers to supply the Union armies with shoddy cloth that quickly wore out. Sometime around 1862 shoddy became a word describing anything of low or inferior quality.

The wool industry has been an important part of industrial history of New Jersey and has been one of the most important sources of manufacturing employment. In 1909, 28% of the stateπs manufacturing workers were employed in textiles. The number dropped to 22% in 1929 and rose again to 28% (121,500 workers) in 1939. In 1992 the industry employed 37,900 workers or 13% of the manufacturing workforce and produced 5% of the stateπs value added manufacturing. Today about 8300 persons are employed in New Jerseyπs 286 companies that are engaged in the apparel trade.

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Note, shortly after this article appeared in the March 2007 issue of the Indicator, the author received a telephone call from retired chemist Dr. Alfred Meiss who worked in the Eavenson & Levering plant from September 1935 to September 1937.

Alfred reports that he was planning to go to Rutgers University and study chemistry at the College of Agriculture. In the middle of the Great Depression higher education had to wait. It was also an "hell of time for jobs" according the Meiss.

Alfred was living in Laurel Springs, New Jersey, after high school graduation. He was hanging out with some friends and one of them, Dave, announced proudly that he had a job, working in a chemistry laboratory. Dave told Alfred that it is a "job you should have." The two young men had been former lab partners in their chemistry class but Dave "wasn't very good at learning." After Dave was asked to leave Eavenson & Levering, a school counselor arranged an interview for Alfred who was offered Daveπs former position.

John A. Levering was treasurer of the company but as he had a

chemistry degree, he was put him in charge of laboratory. Alfred worked as a general technician, gofer, and dogsbody with free run of the vast factory. His starting salary was 15$ per week which was later raised to 18$ for a 50 hour week.

He was later asked if he knew any other boys who would want similar positions on the second and third shifts. The factory operated 24-hours a day. Alfred recommended Carl Siegler whose older brother was already a successful chemist. After working for Eavenson & Levering for a few years, Carl completed his education and eventually went to Merck at West Point, Pennsylvania where he was instrumental in developing some of Merckπs more profitable drug molecules.

Among the duties performed by ≥the boys≤ were sampling incoming raw materials, measuring lanolin content of the various wools, measuring the acid content of wools by titration, checking the surfactant concentrations of the scouring vats, and the purity of bleaching solutions.

The company also used large quantities of sulfuric acid which needed periodic checking. Wools from western United States generally had lots of burrs and dirt, so after scouring, they were dunked in 5% H2SO4, sent into oven for carbonizing. This process helped remove burrs, dirt, and other organic contaminants.

Alfred said that while he more or less went anywhere in the plant, he avoided the areas where incoming wools were graded and sorted. These had the dirtiest working conditions and there was the threat of anthrax exposure.

Alfred was also assigned special duties as needed such as checking the purity of the water used in the factoryπs steam boilers. If the water contained too many inorganic constituents the boiler tubes corroded and failed which could shut down the entire operation. The solution to this problem was to increase the frequency of ≥blow downs≤ which ejected the boiler water and its impurities. While many of the older boiler operators might resent a situation where "17-year old kid comes around and tells them what to do," Alfred reports that everyone in the plant was supportive and it was a very friendly place to work.

Aware that they were polluting the Delaware River with un-recovered lanolin in their waste water, the company experimented with an high speed centrifuge to recover lanolin without acid cracking. The resulting material was very pure but they never really recovered all that much of it.

After leaving Eavenson & Levering, Alfred earned a bacelorπs degree in chemistry, followed by a master's degree, and eventually a PhD from Yale. He was employed at the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station and later at Connecticutπs experiment station. Alfred was also an Associate Professor at Rutgers. After he left Rutgers he was science advisor to one of the countryπs largest ad agencies. For ten years, Alfred and his panel of fellow scientists worked to keep their clients out of trouble for making claims that could not be supported.

Alfredπs later work in food systems lead him to Chile, Pakistan, and India. In the last instance his group worked with the provincial and national public administrations to develop nutrition policies.

He also worked on defense projects after the early 1980's, including a device mounted on automobiles that contained multiple explosive charges for "lots of boom." It was primarily a defensive measure for diplomats and others vulnerable to kidnapping.

Kevin Olsen

Instrumentation Specialist

Chemistry and Biochemistry Support Staff

Montclair State University

Montclair, NJ, 07043

This essay posted 2-27-2007