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48 INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. of the hall with a thinner fabric of the same make. In the full tide of its success, the vast establishment was destroyed by an incendiary fire. It was uninsured; and Williams, whose whole property was in it, died from grief and disappointment. In the mean time, a patent for making felt cloths of a commercial length, by an entirely dis similar process, had been taken out by Joseph Waite, of Leeds, the use of which in England was enjoined by the courts, as conflicting with Williams’s patent. Mr. J. Burrows Hyde, of New York, our informant as to these facts, a gentleman of science and enterprise, bought both the Waite patent and the Williams patent in this country, and sold the rights to the Bay State (now Washington) Mills, at Lawrence, Massachusetts, about 1853. For many years this mill en joyed nearly the complete monopoly of this fabrication in this coun try, to its great profit. The exceptions to this monopoly were a fabrication of felt cloths, not of commercial lengths, conducted in Norwalk, Connecticut, under the Bishop patent, and the manufacture of hat bodies, conducted under the Wells patents. The Williams and Waite patents having expired in Europe and this country, the manufacture has attained the wide and vast extension of the present day. While few foreign exhibits of this fabric were noted, the American felts appeared in innumerable forms. They appeared as printed and embossed piano-cloths and as ladies’ skirts ; as floor-cloths printed by a Philadelphia establishment, with highly artistic designs; as a material for sheathing roofs, vessels, and iron buildings; combined with asbes tos, as non-conducting envelopes for steam-boilers and hot-air pipes; for lining rubber fabrics (being the only material which stretches equally in all directions); in soles for shoes and in gun-wads, in masses of several inches in thickness, for polishing wheels and buffers for jewelers; in other forms, for polishing cabinet-work and marble; and, in a high-cost material, for hammers of piano-keys. Conspicuous among these exhibits were the felts for polishing, made by Charles N. Bacon, of Winchester, Massachusetts, which possessed a thickness, compactness, and adaptation to special purposes which has never been surpassed. In the common felts the raw material is hair, or the cheap est Mexican wool, and in the others, as before said, the finest wool from Silesia. These were interesting illustrations of the almost in finite uses which may be derived from a single attribute of a fibre, all resulting from the serratures in the filament of wool and hair, which give them their felting power. Allied to these goods, though not strictly felts, are the feltings used in paper-making, which are woven fabrics highly felted. The enor-