Processing Wool [In Development]

Hand versus Machine: [Placeholder]

An 11^thcentury Viking longship, with a single sail, made of wool, 10 meters by 10 meters, required about 50 kilos of wool. At that period, it would take about 150 sheep to provide that much wool. It took about an hour to prepare 30 grams of raw wool for spinning; 50 kilos of wool would require 1666 person-hours. To weave enough cloth for that sail, with a count of 10 threads per square centimeter, took 200,000 meters of yarn. To spin this much yarn by hand took about 400 days. Add in 30 days to set up a loom to weave this much cloth, and another 200 days to weave it, by hand. All in all, the Vikingskibsmuseet (Viking Ship Museum) estimates that one sail would involve five workers for about a year.

Compare this to the vast consumption of wool during World War II. In peacetime, a mid-twentieth century civilian consumed an average of 2.2 pounds (one kilo) of wool per year. During World War II, the U.S. Army estimated that each soldier heading into combat required gear consuming 100 pounds of wool, with an annual resupply of about 40 pounds. Mechanized, automated, and organized into factories, about 186,000 textile workers in the United States alone during 1942 produced 227 million linear yards of wool textiles for consumption by the US military - the Bureau of Labor estimated productivity per worker in a 40-hour week to be about 100 yards.