BLIND CARPET WEAVERS

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Mar 29, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 13.

BLIND CARPET WEAVERS.

THERE is a curious carpet, broom, and chair bottom factory in Philadelphia, which, if you entered at 5:30 on a winter evening, you would find running full blast in total darkness. You would hear men running about, shouting orders, carrying goods, or singing and laughing to the rattle and whir of fast looms and other machinery, yet you might not be able to see your hand held a foot from your face.

The explanation is this: No light is needed, for only blind men are employed. The owner is blind, the superintendent is blind, and so are the bookkeeper, machinists, clerks and the 125 workmen. Six of these have neither sight, hearing, nor speech. Only two or three men with sight are employed to look after the choosing of colors and do other occasional overseeing work. Here is a remarkable condition of affairs, yet this factory does a business of over $100,000 a year. The building stands at the corner of Thirty-sixth Street and Lancaster Avenue. In the operating rooms upstairs men are working dexterously at the looms, weaving unerringly the colored patterns of the carpets.

Others are handling sharp knives or dodging swift and dangerous machines, and running up and down stairs and among the machinery without any hesitancy.

These men come to work at 7 o'clock in the morning. They approach the factory quickly from a half dozen directions, with a sharp tapping of their iron sticks upon the pavement. The moment they are within they lay their sticks, with their hats and coats, aside, and they set briskly and cheerily to work, blind men no longer; for training, habit in the task that they perform, takes the place of sight quite accurately.—U. S. Trade Reports.