Where carpet come from?

They came on the scene as early as 2,000 or 3,000 BC. C.

Rugs

are thought to have originated somewhere in the Middle East, although exactly where is still unknown. These first rugs were mainly used to make sitting on the floor more comfortable.

A rug is a textile floor covering that usually consists of a top layer of hair attached to a backing. Hair was traditionally made of wool, but since the 20th century synthetic fibers such as polypropylene, nylon or polyester have often been used, since these fibers are less expensive than wool. The pile usually consists of twisted tufts that are usually heat treated to maintain their structure. The term carpet is often used in a context similar to the term carpet, but carpets are usually considered to be smaller than a room and are not attached to the floor.

Carpet has been a longtime competitor in the race for the most popular flooring options. And while carpeting has sometimes been misunderstood (it's the fault of allergies and hard maintenance), today's carpet products have an unbeatable stain guarantee and a waterproof backing, making them a popular choice among interior design circles. But where does the carpet come from and how has it remained so popular? Let's dive into the history of carpets and rugs to find out. The first rugs were rugs made of sheep wool or goat hair, and were created as early as 2000 or 3000 BC.

They have been traced to the Middle East, but the exact place of origin is still unknown. These old rugs were created to make sitting on the floor more comfortable and were the beginning of the global carpet industry. In 1839, the carpet industry changed forever with the invention of the mechanical loom for weaving carpets, created by Erastus Bigelow. The Bigelow mechanical loom doubled carpet production the first year after its creation and has continued to become one of the leading carpet brands in the United States, remaining at the forefront of the latest technologies and inventions in the field of carpets.

Around the turn of the century, a young woman from Dalton, Georgia, Catherine Evans Whitener, created what are now called tufted rugs when she tried to recreate a quilt she had seen as a wedding gift. The tuft making process helped many families survive the depression, and when it went from bedding to rugs, it gave Dalton, Georgia, the title of “The Carpet Capital of the World,” a name that still stands today. When was carpet used for the first time in homes? Around the 1950s, the carpet industry began to change once again. Long after the industrial revolution that gave way to mechanical looms and other mechanized carpet production techniques, the only fiber used for tufted carpets was plain cotton.

Just in the middle of the century, textile companies introduced other fibers in and around Dalton. Rug types grew to include not only wool, but also artificial fibers such as polyester, nylon, rayon, olefin, and acrylics. With the development of continuous filament nylon yarns in bulk, the production of luxurious and durable carpets became cheaper and therefore more affordable for the masses. Today, the United States is still the leading supplier of carpets worldwide.

Many of the top carpet manufacturers are still located in Northwest Georgia, but carpets can be found all over the world and in all climates. The warmth and comfort it provides, together with the recent innovations that protect carpet fibers against discoloration, wear and stains (and sometimes even water) contribute to the carpet's continued popularity. These factors, as well as the fact that carpets are usually less expensive than hardwood, make solidified carpet a flooring option that will probably never go away. In addition, the carpet offers an unlimited variety of textures, colors and designs.

Durable fibers, such as nylon, which is stain resistant and excellent for high-traffic areas, make carpet a worthy competition compared to other flooring options. Steeped in a rich cultural history and comforting for the feet, it's no wonder that the rug maintains its popularity and will continue to be so for many years to come. Sign in to your account to keep track of all your favorite items and create boards by room or project. The carpet industry emerged at the end of the 18th century.

Skilled weavers produced rugs and carpets using hand-loom technology. In their early years, American carpet manufacturers faced the same problem as other textile manufacturers: imports. The industry, along with textiles in general, in 1816 and increased protection tariffs in the 1820s. In a first industry survey conducted in 1834, Timothy Pitkin found that 20 carpet factories produced about 1 million square yards.

By 1850, a government survey revealed that 116 factories produced 8 million square yards of carpets and carpets (employing more than 6,000 workers). The carpet factories numbered 215, woven more than 20 million square yards and employed 12,000 people. In the 19th century, Americans used carpets to cover poor quality softwood floors. A commentator wrote in 1872 that the “widespread use of carpets was a necessity a few years ago, due to the fact that the floors of our houses were generally built with materials so poor and unchanged in movement that the floor was too unsightly to leave exposed” (Greeley, 187).

In the middle of the 19th century, varnished wooden flooring was introduced). With the wooden floor, there was a decrease in demand for wall-to-wall carpets and an increasing demand for smaller rugs to provide stylistic details. Employment and production figures indicate that, although there was a gradual increase in productivity, production actually increased along with the number of workers. Erastus Bigelow introduced mechanical loom technology for various types of carpets in the early 1840s, and others quickly followed up with competing designs.

While Bigelow's idea—the use of mechanical looms in carpet production—would eventually result in huge increases in productivity, Bigelow's own looms were not the main source of profit, nor did those gains materialize overnight. The production of hand looms surpassed the production of electric looms as early as the 1870s in the Philadelphia area. Mechanical looms were expensive and manufacturers had great difficulty matching the quality of products produced with hand looms. With few exceptions, these facilities produced carpets using fabric technology.

The shiny new factories in Greenville (Mississippi) and Liberty (South Carolina) used the most modern and productive looms and were built according to the most up-to-date standards: single-storey construction and concrete floors, for example, to make possible the use of forklifts. However, the industry encountered an insurmountable obstacle. Despite decades of gradual progress, woven carpets were still too expensive to penetrate the working-class market. The wholesale price of woven rugs increased slightly during the 1950s.

The increases, quite modest, were interpreted in the industry as something of a success. Woven carpet manufacturers also tried other strategies to increase sales in the 1950s. Some manufacturers experimented with selling carpets “on time” (credit) through retailers; others emphasized style and elegance. The main impact of advertising campaigns seems to have been to create awareness and desire for carpets in general.

In 1949, this would have seemed like a winning strategy. Here, the residue of intentional action intersected with the historic accident of Catherine Evans. By the 1920s, the South had become home to most of the U.S. UU.

Part of this shift to the south was due to the movement of capital from the north to the south, but most of the change could be due to new firms from the south: large firms such as West Point Manufacturing in Georgia and Burlington Mills in North Carolina, and smaller firms such as Dalton, Crown Cotton Mill in Georgia and American Hosiery Mill. After the Civil War, and especially after 1880, companies in the south borrowed technology from the north, started at the bottom of the quality chain with the thickest fabrics and began what could be called a regional learning process. Much of this development was the result of a deliberate effort to industrialize the region. By the beginning of the 20th century, the South had not yet developed a regional textile machine manufacturing industry, but cotton, hosiery and other textile companies had recruited and trained a large number of mechanics to maintain machinery purchased in the Northeast.

Mechanics in the Dalton area and nearby Chattanooga began adapting sewing machines to insert raised tufts of thread, and by the early 1930s, many distribution houses became spreading factories or factories. The owners of the spreading mills employed a mostly female workforce to operate the sewing machines that now created the relief patterns. By the late 1930s, several of these companies had begun experimenting with multi-needle machines that could drill wider strips of support material more quickly. Some firms, such as the one cleverly named Cabin Crafts (to evoke the image of a craft industry that had ceased to exist) had started manufacturing small rugs covering the entire surface of a piece of support material with tufts.

Hosiery mechanics, such as Albert and Joe Cobble, founded companies in the southern industrial dynamo of Chattanooga, Tennessee (less than 30 miles from Dalton) to build special machines for the tufted quilt and small carpet industry. Based on these technological roots, entrepreneurs in the area began experimenting with the manufacture of large carpets and wall-to-wall carpets with this process of creating tufts. Around 1949, the firm Cobble Brothers and an innovative Dalton spread manufacturing company, Cabin Crafts, introduced tuft making machinery wide enough to produce carpets in a single pass. Carpet manufacturers could buy cheap pre-woven backing materials.

Manufacturers tested cotton with mostly poor results. Over time, Indian jute became the main support material for tufted carpets during the 1960s. In the 1970s, manufacturers developed synthetic substitutes suitable for jute. The tufted carpet industry experienced a meteoric rise in the 1950s, but many skeptics saw it as a passing fad that would fade away.

A machinery executive joked that “every year was the last great year for tuft manufacturing in the 1950s, according to industry observers. The obvious inferiority of cotton made the argument plausible. There is no doubt that consumers, many in the old fabric industry argued, would eventually get tired of placing glorified bedspreads on their floors. Tufted fabric manufacturers experimented with rayon (disastrously) and stapled nylon (cut, spun) (with some success) in the 1950s.

The most significant advance in terms of raw materials came in the mid-1950s by DuPont Corporation. Fabric manufacturers and others had experimented with DuPont nylon as a fiber for carpets, but nylon lacked the volume needed for floor coverings. DuPont helped ensure that the bust never arrived by developing bulky continuous filament (BCF) nylon in the mid-1950s. The DuPont initiative was clearly stimulated by the growth in carpet sales.

Essentially, tufted manufacturers created a market large enough to justify DuPont's research and development costs. DuPont even helped the new industry by launching its own advertising campaign for carpets made from its trademark 501 nylon in the late 1950s and early 1960s. BCF nylon helped secure the long-term future of the tufted carpet industry. Tufted carpets used, and still use, a variety of fibers.

Stapled nylon could be used in constructions and styles that were not possible with a continuous filament thread: luxurious and lustrous constructions. And in recent years, the industry has increasingly used polypropylene and other continuous filament yarns. However, DuPont BCF nylon (and similar products introduced by Monsanto a little later) are a perfect fit for the least expensive, low-haired low-haired looped constructions that sold best in the emerging market with modest incomes. Average value of carpet shipments, 1950-1965 (price per square yard) Carpet industry production, 1951-1968 (square yards) The tufted carpet industry was the fourth fastest-growing industry in the country in the 1960s, second only to airplanes, television image tubes and computers.

Robert Shaw, CEO of Shaw Industries, which for two decades was the country's leading carpet manufacturer, recalled the late 1950s and 1960s as the era of the “gold coast” in the Dalton area, an era in which demand constantly exceeded supply and small and large manufacturers could succeed with few controls and a “cautious” management style. The brief narrative outlined above describes the rise of an industrial district. By the 1960s, the district had developed several distinct characteristics. The carpet complex was characterized by the rapid emergence of new brands.

No company accounted for up to ten percent of the industry's production. The industry had developed from the deep roots of textile manufacturing and, specifically, the manufacture of bedspreads. Carpet manufacturing grew out of a regional learning process (although it was a small region, similar to Jane Jacobs's “urban regions”). Rug manufacturing was also a decentralized issue.

Some big firms, such as Cabin Crafts and ET, T. Barwick Mills spun part of its own yarn and finished some of its own carpets in-house in the 1960s, but most of the hundreds of small businesses relied on independent spinning or thread production factories and independent custom finishing firms. Carpet finishing provided the industry with significant flexibility. The factories produced some rugs with pre-dyed yarns, but covered a large number of yards with undyed yarn.

This allowed manufacturers to delay the critical color decision for later, increasing the company's flexibility. These services were provided by custom finishing companies. Initially, post-production dyeing was done on ink cartridges or large drums. In other words, the finalists dyed the rugs by piece (even if they were large pieces, 900 feet or more long).

The Dye Becks were produced locally and regionally. The Dalton district offered a classic example of the industrial district of the great Victorian economist Alfred Marshall based on external economies. Clearly, this industry originated in northwestern Georgia because of the unique set of skills developed among managers, mechanics, and workers. Finishing companies and other suppliers clearly played the role of Marshall's “subsidiary businesses “dedicated “to a small branch of the production process.

Innovation and ideas were “in the air,” as Marshall said. With so many companies and workers in close proximity, improvements in technology, management practices, marketing and other areas were quickly transmitted to the entire industry. Paul Krugman has observed that, although different in many ways, the relatively low-tech carpet industry in the Appalachian foothills was quite similar to that of the high-tech Silicon Valley in these respects. Subsequently, DuPont marketed a biological process to produce 1,3-propanediol from corn syrup, which provided significant renewable content to the corresponding Sorona polyester carpet fibers.

These rugs are usually the most expensive due to the relatively slow speed of the manufacturing process. The impact of the carpet industry is great in this region, this state and the nation; and the story of its growth is unique. Traditionally, royal and aristocratic women made embroidered rugs at home, but there has been some commercial manufacturing since steel needles were introduced (the first needles were made of bone) and linen fabric improved in the 16th century. Berber, which is now considered a type of carpet construction, actually comes from the name of a group of North African shepherds called Berbers.

This process is usually a single production line that completes the final stage of carpet construction. Since the 19th and 20th centuries, when it was necessary for wall-to-wall carpets, carpets of different widths could be attached with a sewing iron and sewing tape (previously sewn together) and attached them to the floor on a padded base (pad) with nails, adhesive strips (known in the United Kingdom as grab bars), adhesives or, occasionally, decorative metal bars for stairs. Madrid continued to be a textile center until the 20th century, producing brightly colored carpets, most of whose designs are strongly influenced by French carpet design, and which are often signed (sometimes with the MD monogram; also sometimes with the name Stuyck) and dated on the outer strip. Since he was not allowed to receive gifts from foreign powers, the carpet was sold to my great-grandfather, Judge Jasper Yates, and remained in the former family mansion in Lancaster until about thirty years ago, when it passed into my hands.

Carpet bombing is a type of bombing from aircraft that developed in the 20th century, in which an entire city is bombed (instead of precise attacks against military targets). Perhaps the most important innovation in the carpet world came from Dalton, Georgia, once known as the sheet capital of the world. Handmade rugs come in many designs and colors, however, the traditional and most common example of an Afghan rug is the octagon-shaped elephant foot (Bukhara). A key invention that emerged in the sheet industry, according to the Dalton-based Carpet and Rug Institute, was the invention of the mechanized tuft forming machine in the 1930s.

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