Let's talk about... spinning. If you've heard me talk about spinning, you have probably heard me say that no matter what tools or techniques you use, spinning is always "take fibres, add twist". Whether you use a stick, or whether you use a modern new-fangled industrial spinning machine.
The way in which these modern new-fangled industrial spinning machines introduce twist, though, is rather... creative. It all starts with the Spinning Jenny and now having several spindles served by one spinner, and not just one (or two). That's also when industrialised spinning starts to rely on slivers, or roving, or whatever the thing called Vorgarn in German is called in the context - thin, already drafted-out fibre bands with sometimes a little twist already inserted.
At some point, the spinner is replaced by clockwork and you have the self-actuator. And then a similar process happens as in pre-industrial spinning: While the self-actuator is still doing, essentially, spindle-spinning with its two phases of drafting and spinning and then winding, the ring-spinning machine copies the flyer wheel action (only multiplied and much faster) and spins and winds in one go.
(By the way, I blame the invention of the flying shuttle and John Kay for this. Faster weavers started this escalation, and now here we are today, with air for everything. I'll come to that later.)
And then someone came up and made machine spinning even faster by open-end spinning, where you basically rotate the fibres and pull out a string of them - similar to when you'd pull a bedsheet out of a spinning washing machine. It would twist up, and so do the fibres.
Because there's an event coming up where I might need to know, at least roughly, the difference between how these spinning machines work, I finally read up on the stuff coming after ring-spinning (which was the most recent I did know). Everything that came afterwards sort of seemed more like magic to me (because, as we all know, any technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic).
Now I've read that nifty explanation of "imagine pulling out a bedsheet from a rotating washing machine drum", and apart from imagining it to be rather heavy, unwieldy, and potentially also very wet, it did click in my brain and now I get rotor spinning.
There was only one thing left to conquer: The Vortex. Or, more precisely... vortex spinning.
So I looked around, and read a bit of some papers here and there, and wondered how that would work. Because, you see, in all the other methods, one end of the process chain is always rotating. You have your fibre supply at one end, and the wound-up yarn at the other end, and one of them needs to rotate to get the twist in; you can't just add twist in the middle and have both ends fixed, as that would build up reverse twist in both parts.
I had come far enough to know that there are no moving mechanical parts in the vortex spinning anymore, and that there is airstreams used to introduce circular motion in some way. But you don't have rotation in one of the ends that way, so my poor little brain sort of stopped there, and since it is clearly possible, declared it to be something akin to magic.
Well. Now I've read some more, and it's not magic. It's worse. It's cheating.
Vortex spinning does not take a bundle of fibres and adds twist to them, as all the other methods do in some way. Vortex spinning takes a bundle of fibres (the sliver), splits off some of these fibres and wraps them around the rest.
I think that's not proper spinning. I do guess that yes, if you're generous, you can say it's core-spun. But... well.
(If you're interested now and want to see for yourself, you can read this open-source article about vortex spinning, and there's diagrams towards the end that show how the thingummy is build up (where, interestingly, they still have something they call "the spindle") and a diagram that clearly shows the principle of wrap-a-few-to-simulate-a-yarn that is used here.)
Now I am a little sad. I had expected, um, proper spinning. At least it's fast, though!