The Nonotuck
Silk Company and the Invention of Machine-Twist
by
Marjorie Senechal
The
Nonotuck story begins in the early 1830's
when one Samuel Whitmarsh moved to
Northampton, Massachusetts, built a cocoonery on his estate, planted mulberry trees, and set up a silk mill. Vistors
flocked to see the miracle but, according to one eyewitness,"the mills
were kept running in order to increase the sale of mulberry trees." By the
end of the decade, the mulberry speculation had crashed, and Whitmarsh went
with it. But his silk company was reborn in 1842 as the main enterprise of an
abolitionist utopian community, the Northampton Association for Education and
Industry. Its dissolution in 1846 ended sericulture in Northampton--but
not the manufacture of products from imported raw silk. Some of
its members remained in the area and continued their efforts to create a
humane industrial society.
One
of them was Samuel Lapham Hill. The recently invented sewing machine was
plagued with problems, not least the uneven quality of the available thread.
Hill seized the challenge to devise a stronger, smoother filament. The judges at the 1876 Centennial
Exhibition tell the story: Hill " . . . submitted it, in 1852, to Mr.
Singer . . . . [who] put a spool on his machine, threaded it up, and commenced
sewing. After sewing sufficiently to enable him to judge of its merit, he
[. . exclaimed . . ], 'I shall want all
you can make,'--a prophecy literally fulfilled. The new fabric assumed the name
of 'machine twist,' and from that time to the present the amount of silk consumed
upon sewing-machines is marvelous." Machine twist put Hill's company on
the Silk Map: in just over two decades
it was the largest silk thread manufacturer in the country. Yet, it seems, no
one has studied the development of this
marvelous invention! This paper seeks to fill that gap.
Marjorie
Senechal is the Louise Wolff Kahn Professor in Mathematics and History of
Science and Technology, where she has taught since 1966, and is also Director
of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute there. In Smith's Historyof Science and
Technology program, her courses include "Ancient Inventions" (about a
third of which is devoted to textiles -- see http://www.smith.edu/hsc/museum and "Science, Technology, and Silk." Her current
research includes the silk industries of Albania and of Northampton, Massachusetts, with particular emphasis on
their scientific and technological contexts and challenges. She is a co-founder
and
director of the Northampton Silk Project.