Eiderdown Cloth
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a knitted woolen fabric with a soft, heavy nap. It receives its name from a fancied resemblance of this nap to eider down. The woolen yarn used in manufacturing this cloth is soft and bulky. Sometimes it is backed with a finer cotton yarn. After knitting, the nap is raised by "gigging" or "teaseling." Stripes and checks are produced by different colored yarns. Dots and other figures are embroidered before napping by a specially constructed machine. Eiderdown cloth is used for children's coats, hoods, robes, dressing gowns, afghans, coverlets, etc. Eiderdown cloth is made single or double faced. See Napping ; Gigging ; Double Cloth ; Knitting Eiffel (i'fel) Tower, or Tour Eiffel, a lofty iron tower erected on the exposition grounds of Paris in 1889. The plans were drawn by Gustav Eiffel, the same who designed the framework for Bartholdi's statue of Liberty in New York harbor. The Eiffel Tower is 1,000 feet high--the tallest structure in the world. It is built of iron lattice work and is exceedingly graceful in outline. Three elevators, as well as stairways with 1927 steps, lead to its summit. The interior affords room for a number of restaurants and other enterprises. During the Paris Exposition the ascent was made by thousands of visitors, who were delighted with the extensive view to be enjoyed from the summit. Some notion of its height may be had from the statement that, allowing twelve and one-half feet to the story, the total height of the tower is equivalent to that of an eighty story building. It was so built that it still stands secure. Scientific men regard it as worth the money and cost as a station for the observation of air density, temperature, moisture, velocity of wind, etc., at different heights. It well illustrates the expansive power of heat. It is eight inches taller in summer than in winter. A wireless telegraph station has been installed in the top of the tower. The tower serves also as a kind of signal station. A system of electrical illumination flashes forth the hours and quarters.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 description of the manufacture is still accurate as far as it goes: a napped knitted wool cloth, gigged or teaseled to raise a soft pile, made single- or double-faced for babies' coats, hoods, robes and dressing gowns. What has gone is the trade itself. Cheap cotton flannelette took over the nursery and bathrobe market, and from the late 1970s onward napped polyester fleece — the sort sold as polar fleece — captured almost everything eiderdown cloth had been used for, being warmer for its weight, washable and unshrinkable. "Eiderdown" today reaches most people as the name of a quilt, or of the genuine down still gathered from eider nests in Iceland, rather than of a knitted woolen fabric; the cloth is now largely a term for collectors of vintage textiles.
Written for this edition, 2026.