P. & C. Garnett Ltd
British textile engineering company
P. & C. Garnett Ltd (later succeeded by Garnett Wire Ltd) was a British textile engineering and ironfounding company based in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire. The firm is most notable for inventing the "Garnett machine" and "Garnett wire", a specialized metallic saw-tooth wire used to clothe rollers in carding and waste-opening machines. The widespread adoption of their machinery in the textile recycling industry led to the mechanical process of recovering fibers being generically known as "garnetting".
History
Founding and early development
The company was established in 1850 (sometimes recorded as 1851) by Peter Garnett (1825–1900) and Charles Garnett. Operating originally out of the Prince Works, and later the Wharfe Works in Cleckheaton, the firm specialized in manufacturing pulleys and preparatory textile machinery.
Peter Garnett developed a patented saw-tooth wire that differed from contemporary card clothing, which traditionally used wire teeth set in leather or rubber foundations. The all-steel, wedge-shaped teeth were formed by punching and cutting intervals along the wire, which was then wound into spiral grooves on rollers to create a highly rigid opening surface.
In 1865, mechanical engineer John Henry Leather (1842–1912) joined the firm as a resident manager and partner. Leather was instrumental in advancing the firm's technology; in 1877, he patented a method for securing the toothed wire in double rows upon the carding cylinders. This advance allowed rollers to be clothed much more densely, which facilitated the processing of finer materials and led to the development of specialized "Morel" rollers for the mechanical removal of burrs from raw wool.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q140157452. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1850, 1851, 1825 and 1900.
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This entry incorporates text from “P. & C. Garnett Ltd” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.