Hi Roger, I used to work in the offices of a Copper Wire manufacturer and my husband did his engineering apprenticeship within the various factory departments for part of each year, he was on a sandwich course. My department boss would take the girls who worked for him on a tour around the various departments of the factory to see the various processes the copper went through to produce the products we were all typing invoices etc., for. A wire drawer looks after a Drawing machine. A Billet, like an large ingot, of Copper was put into the first drawing machine and would be drawn, kind of stretched, down to a finer state by the dies within the machine. The next machine along would have smaller dies than the first to draw the wire finer still, and so on down the line of machines. The copper would pass through each machine in turn until the correct thinness of wire was reached according to what was needed to fill the orders. Some wire was then either coated in an Enamel coating via another machine while others were coated in cotton strands that were plaited around the wire as the wire and the strands of cotton were passed through the plaiting machine to be automatically coated with cotton strands forming theplait as it all went along. Look at the flex on a household iron to see the type of cotton plaiting I mean. Some wire was made up of a number of strands of fine wire plaited together by another machine, the diameters of these plaits of wire varied according to what was required. These too would have a covering of one kind or another. There was also Copper Strip where instead of being drawn to a round fineness the copper was drawn out into flat strips of varying thicknesses and widths according to needs. In the case of the comber, neither myself nor my husband can think what job a comber would have in a Wire Drawing factory. I can only think that as the Maibery men were living in Halifax where there were a lot of Woollen mills perhaps they were changing occupation accordingly. Although they were experienced Wire Drawers perhaps, Thomas Maibery in Particular, was changing his occupation to become a Wool Comber but he noted both occupations on the census schedule in 1851 just because he was capable of both occupations. Hope this helps a little. Regards Jenny DeAngelis <<I have just identified a family in 1841/51 census records where a number of the men gave their occupation as "wire drawer" and in one instance the word "comber" is associated. Until I spotted the "comber" reference I had considered them to be simply associated with the metal industry. However, that set me thinking -always a bit dangerous! >>

A combing machine would have been the one that took several strands of wire (up to thousands) and twisted them into a bundle. This wire could be both bare wire as used in flexible wire which would have been later coated in a insulation, or a large group of insulated wires forming a cable used for such things as telephone lines etc. It would have been similar to machines used in rope and thread making. Possibly one or more machines would have formed an assembly line - each machine adding an additional covering. I often come across double cotton covered wires in the pipe organ trade. We use wire up to #35 AWG (.005600") which is not that much thicker than very coarse hair. Incredibly it was often coated in two layers of waxed silk and was used on very small electro-magnets. Many of these units are still in daily operation 120 years later! The people who tended these machines would have been very skilled people indeed to keep them running smoothly. Traditionally the wires were not colour coded so sorting them out in large cables as used in pipe organs and telephone cables was a time consuming and tedious job. Today wire is usually made with plastic or enamel coatings and is colour coded. a patent on a machine that does this work. http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090065091?Comments[do]=mod&Comments[pid]=1&Comments[id]=1 a picture of a simple machine http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/359557928/electrical_wire_and_cable_making_machine/showimage.html Nelson Denton pipe organ builder