The Textile Fibers

Throughout past centuries a few simple fibers, cotton, flax, wool and silk, have been used mainly for making clothes. Today all these fibers but silk, because of its scarcity and high price, are also used for industrial purposes. Cotton is used for reinforcing motorcar tires and plastic materials, linen is used for wing coverings on airplanes and wool fibers are used as heat and sound isolation in building construction.

Many fibers are available from natural sources (all plants contain fibers) but only a small number can be useful for textile purposes. More so there are no natural fibers that can compete in usefulness with cotton, wool, linen and silk for modern textile purposes.

These fibers have many advantages but there are also disadvantages, so during the past eighty years men has looked for and found the ways to manufacture fibers possessing properties to any taste. The natural fibers vary considerably and are affected by climatic conditions over which man has little or no control at all. But man-made fibers can be produced having all desirable properties: strength, luster, handle and can be died easily.

Moreover, the cost of these man-made fibers is relatively low and materials made from them are not too expensive as well.

However, there are man-made fibers such as viscose and rayons which have to be obtained from natural sources. Thus, cellulose which forms the basis of manufacture of rayons has to be made from cotton wastes or wood. So, these man-made fibers are not quite independent of nature. But it was not the limit. Men has been learning to produce new and new types of synthetic fibers made from chains of molecules of air, coal and oil.