FULLER, a workman employed in the woollen manufactures to mill or scour cloths, serges, and other stuffs, in order to render them more thick, compact, and durable.
FULLER'S EARTH, a species of clay much used in scouring woollen cloth and other stuffs, and thus freeing them from oil and grease. Its colour is greenish white, and different other shades of green. Sometimes it has a spotted colour. It is opaque, shining, and resinous in the streak, very soft, and possesses a greasy feel. It falls into powder with water, and melts into a brown spongy scoria before the blowpipe. In England it occurs in beds; the best is found in Buckinghamshire and Surrey. When good it has a greenish-white or greenish-grey colour, falls into powder when put into water, appears to dissolve on the tongue like butter, communicates a milky hue to water, and deposits very little sand when mixed with boiling water. It is used by fullers in taking grease out of cloth before the soap is applied; and as it contains a considerable proportion of alumina, the remarkable deterative property which woollen cloth possesses depends upon the alumina which it thus obtains. Malcolm, in his Survey of Surrey, published in 1809, states the consumption of fuller's earth for the whole kingdom to be about 6300 tons, and that Surrey alone furnished 4000 tons.