A beamer was an occupation in the
cotton industry
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus ''Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor perce ...
.
The taper's beam is a long cylinder with flanges where 400 plus ends (threads) are wound side-by-side. Creels of bobbins with the correct thread, mounted on a beaming frame wind their contents onto the beam. The machine is watched over by a "beamer".
In early days beaming was often done in the
weaving shed
A weaving shed is a distinctive type of mill developed in the early 1800s in Lancashire, :Derbyshire and Yorkshire to accommodate the new power looms weaving cotton, silk, woollen and worsted. A weaving shed can be a stand-alone mill, or a ...
but later the process tended to be transferred to the
spinning mill
Spin or spinning most often refers to:
* Spinning (textiles), the creation of yarn or thread by twisting fibers together, traditionally by hand spinning
* Spin, the rotation of an object around a central axis
* Spin (propaganda), an intentionall ...
. The spinners would send lorries loaded with of beams wound with thread of the ordered specification to the weavers.
Several tapers beams would be attached to creels on the Tape Sizing machine, and the threads from these would be sized and combined to create the smaller weavers beams. As a rule of thumb, a tapers beam had thread long enough to make 20 weavers beams.
Colloquially, the term beamer was used for anyone responsible for moving beams of yarn. In a weaving shed that bought its yarn on the beam, the Beamer would be the operative who carried new beams to the looms and gaited them.. A 'drawer-in' was sometimes referred to as a beamer.
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Obsolete occupations
Cotton industry
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