Outside Fuzz
The enveloping shell of the backpack industry.
– On to the fabric parts. –
To make fabric you start with fibers. Unless some bug-eyed dudes swoop by in a flying saucer and drop a factory nearby, you start thousands of years ago with whatever fuzzy stuff you find lying around, and work up from there. That fuzzy stuff has gotten exceedingly trendy and is now called natural fiber. You can still call it fuzz if you want, but you have to start back there, back in the Dark Ages of Fuzz if you really want to understand where it comes from.
So, natural fiber, in the Fuzz Age.
Wool, for instance, that's one, that's natural. There's nothing like an especially hairy animal to inspire some folks, and that's one of the things that happened between sheep and humans. A lot of other things have been rumored but we're really only interested in stories involving the fuzzy, woolly parts.
Wool goes way Back in the Creepy Era, like 3000 years B.C.E. or more, well within the Late Stone Age (when our ancestors were still attempting to put tail fins on rocks, stayed up way after dark because of this obsession, and nearly went extinct because of all the toothy night-creepers on the prowl for snacks). But sheep. Someone discovered sheep and sheep proved to be so useful that now there are about 40 different breeds, producing around 200 types of wool of various grades. New Zealand is big for sheep, and Australia, the former Soviet states, China, South Africa, and Argentina and so on are too, as if you cared.
But.
Let's not forget cotton, and linen, and silk.
Cotton and linen and silk — oh my!
Linen comes from the flax plant, and it might be the oldest natural textile fiber, dating to more than 5000 years B.C.E.
Cotton is a lot newer at about 3000 years B.C.E.
Then there's silk, from about 2600 years B.C.E. This is pretty surprising when you wonder who started unwinding cocoons to see what was inside, and then made something out of the leftovers. But back then they had more time because the future had not been invented yet, so many, many strange things unfolded. No one so far has made a backpack out of silk, even after all these millennia. (Or thought of a reason to try).
Maybe you can do it this year. Maybe next year. Maybe never. Never works for most things.
Anyhow, people got by, but all the fussing with fuzz and nature and all was tedious.
– Life in the Tedious Age. –
Here's how it went...
First they went out and grabbed a sheep (or a cotton plant or a stalk of flax). Good. OK. Now.
The next step in the process is to remove as much fuzz as possible from the target plant or animal without getting any of your body parts bitten off or getting so beat up in the process that said parts are hardly worth remaining attached to.
Sheep are nasty and nippy. Avoid if possible. They may look puffy and dumb, but are in truth a tribe of angry and ornery stumpy-legged bastards, especially ornery if you try yanking fuzz from them. Wiry little buggers too, who know how to use those teeth of theirs. Cotton and flax? No. No, they don't fight nearly so much.
So OK, you have a wad of fuzz, a big wad. Now you have to pick the foreign matter out of it. That's a euphemism there, that one. And score another one for cotton and flax. Cotton and flax don't defecate wildly in all directions while you rip at their fuzzy parts. So, foreign matter. It can be things other than poop, like dirt, insects, leaves, seeds, or anything you don't like the look of. Poo has always been the gold standard in the world of foreign matter, and is the unit of measure to judge every other kind of foreign matter by. Remove all foreign matter, first the nasty, and then the more delicate and innocuous kinds, and move on to the next step.
Which is — to wash your hands.
Which is (the real next step, that is) loosening up the fibers by teasing them out of that big matted wad of fuzz you have. Then you card the fuzz. Carding is like combing. Carding gives you a thin smooth layer of fuzz with all the little fuzzicles going in the same direction. Think of your high school geography teacher's comb-over. Like that but maybe dustier, and possibly not so greasy, but yet containing a last few devious, remnant stray bugs attempting to avoid detection, intent on catching a free ride into the big city with you.
After debugging and carding comes spinning. Spinning twists and pulls all these fibers (the fuzzicles) into a tight, string-like yarn that holds together by itself. By this stage things are beginning to look familiar in that you have something almost threadlike.
Next, on a loom, combine a bunch of these yarns parallel to each other (the warp yarns), and then weave them with some other yarns going the other way (the woof yarns), and then you have a fabric. For proof, look closely at a piece of fabric. Hold it up in front of you. Squint. You will see some yarns going up and down (the warp) and others weaving among those from right to left (the woof). That there is your fabric.
This great long fuzz-handling process is all so massively tedious to even read about it's no wonder people were banging their heads against trees just waiting for mechanical looms to arrive on the scene. Which they did. And then things remained insanely tedious (by our standards) for a long, long time yet.
But at least by this point we finally had fabric to work with. The future had also recently been invented, and then, on schedule, one day it arrived and sat its suitcase down on the pavement and looked around.
So what?
Time for the appearance of factories and mass production, that's what.
Ah! Most appropriate!
– Hang some tinsel on the smokestacks, Jane! –
Well, eventually all kinds of people got to tinkering and re-tinkering with new kinds of fuzz and new machines to tweak and torture fuzz, and then everything got to be steam powered and there were lumbering giant factories all over the place, and fabric began piling up like crazy. We've already been over the next step, the sewing. No matter what, there has always been a shortage of fingers, and fingers can only sew rags at a fixed rate, so the sewing machine had to be invented, which it was.
Done, and then...
Then, once the sewing machine arrived people began sewing together pieces of anything they could get their hands on, furiously, but there were still no backpacks. Or not many. Backpacks were handy for war, and war has always been popular, but very few people ever had the idea to pick up and go out hiking for fun, and most of them were stoned to death before they got past the city limits. Because see, when you have an idea, even if it's a pretty neat idea, it's no good until everyone else gets used to it, and thinks they invented it, and are sure that everyone around them agrees with it, which makes it OK to do, and that takes a while. In the meantime, you reach for the rocks.
So there was no backpacking, but the occasional stoning did relieve a lot of the remaining boredom.
And World War II helped.
The war disrupted many things. Big new factories sprang up everywhere. Unforeseen people did unheard of things in surprising places. Some things that people did, they tried hard to forget, but some of the other things were good and people tried to continue doing them. Synthetic fibers and synthetic fabrics were invented around this time. And they were found Good. And the people did Praise them, and did then manufacture Useful Products from them. And it was Good all over, pretty much. After the war and all, which was not great in itself, you understand.
– Older than weasels, but newer than dirt. –
Some synthetic fabrics are older than you might expect. Most of them are older than you, or your parents, or your grandparents. True, true, and again true (in that order).
Take rayon, the first manufactured fiber. Rayon was supposed to be an artificial silk, and dates from around 1900. But the idea goes way back to an English scientist in 1665 or thereabouts who speculated about making artificial silk. This idea, however, took another 200 years to become a reality (there is something about English ideas, you see, that requires them to sit for decades and stew, unnoticed). And there was another 50-year period, or thereabouts after that, while the futzy, persnickety, annoying details were sorted out. And then rayon happened.
But rayon manufacture is pretty typical of synthetics in general, even now.
First, purified cellulose from wood chips or cotton mill leavings gets converted by chemicals into a soluble compound — a big vat of liquid glop. (Glop perennially rises to the top of almost every manufacturer's list of things to put into vats.)
Then this glop is squeezed through spinnerets, devices something like your bathroom shower head, though conceptually similar to a spider's back end but without the attitude. A spinneret has lots of little holes. Put glop under pressure on the upstream side and long fibers extrude like spaghetti from the downstream side, and then solidify in the presence of the right chemicals.
After that, the fibers are treated, and treated some more, and eventually spun into yarns, which are ultimately woven, and then you have rayon cloth.
– The N word, in a rainbow of colors, all inedible. –
Nylon was the Big Synthetic, with a capital B and a capital S. And still is. It was developed in 1938 by the E.I. DuPont de Nemours Company, known up to then mainly as an explosives maker.
The raw materials for nylon can come from coal, or petroleum, or natural gas. Mix them with a bit of water, and air, in the right way, and you get something special — molecules of hexamethylenediamine and sebacoyl chloride. When molecules of hexamethylenediamine and sebacoyl chloride meet, they link together to create chains of new molecules, chains that are thousands and thousands of atoms long. You get millions of these chains, called polymers.
That is nylon.
Nylon can be shiny, semi-shiny, or dull. It is stretchable, resilient, and has great abrasion resistance. It is water repellent, easy to launder, and dries fast. It keeps its shape during use and during washing. It melts instead of burning. It defies insects, rot and mold. Animals don't want to eat it. It can be made into fabric or produced as solid chunks for mechanical parts or things like buckles, cord locks, D-rings, grommets, hooks, ladder locks, snaps, tiedowns, zipper pulls, doodads, diddly-bobs, and whatchamacallits.
Nylon is available in any color you want.
Nylon pretty well opened the floodgates. After it, there was a torrent of other synthetic fabrics. Here is a partial list of current synthetics:
3XDRY®, A.M.Y.®, AEGIS Microbe Shield®, aio®, Airstretch&trage;®, Akwatek®, Amersil®, Anso-tex®, Antron®, Armor-Tan™, Artic Fleece®, Augusta™, Avora® FR, Berber By Glenoit, Bluesign®, Body Care®, Buzz Off™ Insect Shield, Caprolan®, CELBOND®, Chantilly, Chinella®, Cleerspan®, Climashield™, Cocona™ Fabrics, ComforTemp® DCC, ComFortrel XP®, ComFortrel®, CoolMax®, CoolVisions®, Cordura®, Creora®, Cryon™, Dacron®, Darlexx Superskin®, Darlexx Thermalastic®, Darlexx®, Deer Creek Fabrics, Dorlastan®, Dow Corning® Active Protection Syst, Dow XLA™, driFIRE®, Dri-release®, DryLiner®, Dryon™, DrySport®, DuPont™ Active Layer, Earthwhile™, Eclipse™, Eclipse®, EcoSpun®, Entrant®, Entrant®, EPIC, ESP®, eVENT® Fabric, Finesse®, FireBloc, Fosshield®, Furelle®/Petite Furelle, Glenaura®, GlenPile®, Glospan®, GORE DRYLOFT®, GORE WINDSTOPPER®, GORE-TEX®, GORE-TEX® IMMERSION TECHNOLOGY®, GORE-TEX® OCEAN TECHNOLOGY®, Hardline®, Hollofil 808®, HOLLOFIL®II, Holofiber™, Hybrid®, Hydrasuede®, Hydrofil®, Hydrofil®, Hydroflex®, Hydroweave®, HyPUR-cel®, Hytrel®, Ingeo®, Innova®, Innova® AMP, Innova® MicroFleece, Kevlar®, K-Kote Plus®, Lenzing Modal®, Lycra®, M.C.S. Blocker®, M.C.S.®, Marrakech, Meryl®, Meryl® Actisystem, Micro-loft®, Microspike, MicroSpun®, MicroSupplex, Microtherm®, MiniMicro®, MynxUV®, Mystique™, Nordic Spirit®, Novolon®, OuterBounds™, Outlast®, Parados®, Pertexion®, Polarguard®, Polarguard® 3D, Polarguard® HV, Polartec® Aqua Shell®, Polartec® Classic, Polartec® Power Dry®, Polartec® Power Shield, Polartec® Power Stretch®, Polartec® Thermal Pro®, Polartec® Wind Pro®, Polartec® Windbloc®, Polartec® Windbloc-ACT®, Popcorn Sherpa, Primaloft PL1®, Prima-Tex Fabrics, Proof Ace®, ProSpin®, Quallofil®, Recyclon™, Reflexx®, Relyon™, Repreve®, Rezillion™, Rhinotek®, S2 Technologies™-Stretch System, S3 Technologies™-Soft Shell Systemity, Salus®, Schoeller®-deoline, Schoeller®-dryskin, Schoeller®-dynamic, Schoeller®-dynatec, Schoeller®-keprotec®, Schoeller®-PCM, Schoeller®-prestige, Schoeller®-reflex, Schoeller®-skifans, Schoeller®-spirit, Schoeller®-stretchlight, Schoeller®-WB-400, Schoeller®-WB-formula, SeaCell®, Sensil®, Sensura®, Sewfree®, SmartSilver™, SOLARMAX®, Sorbtek®, Sorona®, Spectra®, Spunnaire®, StainSmart®, STORM DENIM™, StrataTek, SunDancer, Supplex®, SUPRIVA™, Tactel®, Teflon®, Telar®, Temptrol™, Tencel®, Thermolite®, Thermore®, ThinSkin®, Thinsulate®, Tibetan Fleece, Toughtek®, Transpor®, Travtech®, Triphibian®, Tru-Ballistic®, Tullahoma Fabrics, Ultra Fresh Silpure, Unidyne TechnaGard®, VisaEndurance®, Visco-cel®, Vortech®, XALT®, X-Static®, YB Wet®, Yukon 2000®, and Yukon Fleece®.
– Beyond the Fuzz. –
The last couple thousand years have moved us beyond flax, cotton, wool, and silk into the chemical era, which is very technical. In fact, if you make your own gear you can't buy most of these new fabrics, no matter how much you might want to. They are available only to manufacturers, in bulk lots, and require training and even special equipment to sew, and you will never be allowed to gain the secret knowledge of how to deal with them. Nor will you get your own secret code whistle, let alone learn the sacred handshake.
Today the manufacture of a simple thing like a commercial backpack requires a factory full of complex machinery, trained workers, and office staff. Such as — accountants, advertising experts, bar tackers, bookkeepers, buyers, cutters, designers, expediters, inspectors, inventory controllers, lawyers, maintenance and equipment technicians, markers, marketers, pressers, receivers, seam rippers, sewing machine operators, sewing machine repairers, sergers, shippers, supervisors, tax experts, trimmers, and warehouse staff. And probably several more categories that are too arcane to imagine.
Hundreds of people. All buzzing with energy and expertise, working together to make things we absolutely take for granted.
Luckily ultralight backpacks are simple by design, and therefore simple to make out of simple materials, even if you are simple-minded, so if you want to make your own ultralight pack you still can.
But if you want to get into The Business you have to decide if you can do all the work yourself or afford to hire someone. And either way you still have to compete with bigger companies that send their work thousands of miles away to distant countries where people are glad to have something to do, let alone earn a living from it. You'll be competing in one of the most ruthless businesses on the planet, where high pay is a few cents an hour.
Happy free enterprise!