Lefier Robot

In a dingy room in Manhattan's garment district last week a skilled knitting-machine operator, brought in by his employer, inspected a strange new device. He pushed a lever. The loom began to clank as tiny lights winked on a control box attached to the wall. Red, blue and yellow threads spun off their spools, were knitted into an intricately patterned fabric. The puzzled operator peered over, beneath and behind the row of darting needles, looking for a chain of perforated cards. There were no cards. Enthusiastic demonstrators of this new robot, called the Lefier machine, claimed that it was the longest advance in pattern reproduction since Jacquard.

This was high praise indeed. The loom in which Joseph Marie Jacquard made practical the ideas of several 18th Century inventors was declared public property in France in 1806, and Jacquard was rewarded with royalties, a pension, a statue. In making fabrics with woven-in designs, it is required that every time a thread of weft is passed across the warp, certain needles be lifted from the row, corresponding to the cross-section of the design at that point. Jacquard solved this with a series of perforated cards permitting some needles to pass through the holes and stopping others. Jacquard cards are now made from the design by automatic machinery. But since a separate card is needed for every thread of weft, a 10-in. design may require 800 cards which cost $120 to make.

Setting up the control for a 10-in. design by the Lefier method costs about $5. The design is laid down with insulating paint on a sheet of copper. An electric contact is swept back & forth across the sheet. Through the sheet and the contact a weak electric current is passed. Wherever the contact is separated from the copper by the insulated design the current is broken. This intermittent current is sent to an amplifier, relayed thence to a line of electromagnets, each of which controls a needle in the loom. Thus, for every cross-section of the design, the proper needles are lifted from their positions. After every three sweeps (for a three-color design) of the contact the cylinder carrying the copper sheet rotates a notch. In effect the robot electrically scans the design line by line, much as a modern televisor scans an image. It does not matter how complex the pattern is. A signature scrawled on the copper sheet would come out faithfully reproduced in the fabric.

The Lefier attachment is backed by a syndicate which includes Manhattan's famed banking firm of Lehman Brothers and Milton Erlanger of Erlanger Mills (B. V. D.'s). They sent a small, vociferous textile man named George Fisher to Paris where he acquired U. S. rights from Societe de Construction et d'Appareillage Scientifique pour le Tricotage et le Tissage, otherwise known as "Socast." U. S. sales plans are to be formulated this month.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.