It’s Magic!
Arthur C. Clarke, one of the father’s of science fiction, once wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Now, he was actually giving advice to other science fiction authors, but his words apply to most people. How so? Well, do you know how a cell phone works. Yes, you use it to make phone calls, but do you know how it works? How the signals are sent through the phone, how the buttons trigger reactions on the screen, how it can recognize, interpret, and instantaneously respond to a human touching the screen?
Or, perhaps most important of all, how your words are transferred from tiny device to towers or satellites and, with hardly a delay or distortion, are transmitted to a single other cellphone among billions of other phones? I don’t – they’re a mystery to me. It’s startling when you begin to think about just how much of your life is affected by forces you don’t understand, and how those that we do understand are swiftly changing to become incomprehensible to us. So, in order to remove some of that confusion, we here are at Oxi Fresh carpet cleaning are going to explain how one thing is made, so you can move that from the “Magic” to the “Technology” column. So let’s look at how carpets are made!
To begin, bales of the carpet fibers – nylon for example – are put into a machine that first breaks them up into more manageable pieces. These travel down a conveyor belt to the carding machine, which untangles the fibers and lines them up into rows. These bands of straightened fibers then put into barrels and are transferred to the drawing frame. This machine pulls the bands from the barrels and processes them into long, loose threads which are spooled up. Then two of those threads are twisted together. Finally, those threads are twisted together with another thread to form a 2-ply strand of yarn.
The yarns are then flash-baked to make sure that they don’t untwist from each other and then are taken to the Tufting department. Set up on an elaborate rig, the spools of yarn feed into the tufting machine. This device has hundreds of needles that work simultaneously, looping the carpet through a canvas backing, while blades underneath cut the carpet pile to the appropriate length. After that, the carpets are dyed using various methods (injected dye, soaking, air pressure/heat) and have a second backing applied. Then, finally, the carpet is cut and rolled up.
Then it’s installed in your home where dirt and stains get applied and you call a green carpet cleaner to help out. Well, hopefully you won’t get stains on your new carpet – but it’s inevitable. That’s why carpet cleaning companies exist. Well, hopefully this post took some of the mystery of carpets. Now all you have to wonder about is how all those various machines operate. Maybe introducing them wasn’t the best idea . . . let’s just say they run on magic.
