Parameters of a layer forming machine for flax processing

The paper considers the machines used for flax layer-thinning during its processing. The designs of the most widely used layer-thinning machines of Russian, Belarusian and foreign production in the linen industry are analyzed. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the machines of both Russian and Belarusian production have the principle of the thinning with a fixed layer, and some foreign ones with free fixation.

A White Linen Hall for Newry or Belfast?

The prodigious growth of the industrialised linen industry associated with nineteenth-century Belfast developed from an earlier framework of eighteenth-century domestic production. This study outlines the vigorous competition in the 1780s between the linen drapers of Newry and Belfast to establish White Linen Halls where they sold the linen they had bought from domestic weavers in local linen markets. Each town offered specific advantages; however, the industry was transformed in the 1820s with the introduction of mechanised ‘wet’ spinning in Belfast and the commercial competition between the two White Linen Halls abated, leaving only the name as testimony to their once important role.