Textile industry, history

For centuries the spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth had remained a manual operation. In England, for example, women and children, working at home, combed cotton with wire brushes and spun it by hand; the father then wove the cotton on a hand loom. Output was expensive and consumed locally. Most of Britain's cloth was home-made from wool in the West Country, Yorkshire and Lancashire. 1702 a critical turning point occurred when Thomas Cotchett and George Sorocold built a silk mill powered by a waterwheel at Derby. Their mill was probably Britain's first factory, for it was a single establishment with complex machinery, a source of power and accommodation for workers.

Machine productions was the answer; it would be faster, cheaper and more uniform in quality; the machine was needed to made large scale marketing possible. Textile machines were invented and improved in Britain to increase the speed of spinning and weaving. The first key innovation was the fly-shuttle, invented by John Kay in 1733. On the hand loom the operator pulled the shuttle carrying the woof from one side of the warp to the other. Kay used hammers which propelled the shuttle back and forth between the warp threads. In 1764, James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which increased productivity per worker by a factor of eight.

In 1761, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufacturies offered a prize of £50 for a spinning machine that could turn fiber into yarn and replace the hand-operated jersey wheel. Numerous inventors tried their hand; in 1768 Richard Arkwright (1732-92) employed John Kaye, a clockmaker from Warrington, to help build wooden models. In 1769 they invented the water frame, which passed the carded cotton between successive pairs of rollers, each pair in turn revolving with greater velocity, so that a great number of threads of any degree of fineness and hardness could be drawn. The spun thread was now strong enough to be used as warp. At first he relied on water power, but as the machinery grew more complex he turned to steam engines for power. Arkwright made a great fortune from his patents. While his role as the main creator of the factory system has been exaggerated, Arkwright was remarkable in his ability to adapt other people's techniques, raise funds from investors, and persevere with his vision of a mechanized textile factory. His Arkwright network of mills across Britain employed over over 5000 workers by 1782. In 1779 Samuel Crompton combined the Hargreaves and Arkwright ideas into the "muslin machine" (or "spinning mule") which could spin yarn for making muslin (until then imported from India). Originally known as the muslin wheel, or hall-in-the-wood wheel, In 1785, Dr. Edmund Cartwright invented the first power loom, which mechanized weaving operations and eventually developed into the modern power loom. In 1794, Eli Whitney, an American, patented the cotton gin, which separated the cotton fibers from the seeds, making short-fiber cotton grown in America the major raw material for the first stage of the industrial revolution. Between 1781 and 1791 imports of cotton into Britain quadrupled, reaching 100 million pounds in 1815 and 263 million in 1830, and kept growing until the supply was cut by war in 1861. In 1811 Britain saw more than 5,000,000 spindles at work, of which 310,500 used the Arkwright principle, 4,600,00 that of Crompton's mule spindle, and 156,000 that of Hargreaves's jenny.

In 1751, Britain exported £46,000 of cotton cloth; by 1800 this had soared to £5.4 million and by 1861 to £46.8 million. The cloth made for cheaper and better quality clothing, and was in demand across Europe and the world.

The United States followed the British lead, using stolen blueprints and illegally immigrating engineers. Samuel Slater (1768-1835) of Rhode Island pulled American cotton-spinning technology by constructing carding, drawing, and roving machinery, and by determining the operating and gearing ratios necessary to use water power. By 1850 the American had built their own industrial revolutions around textiles, and use of abundant water power in new England.

See also

• Industrial Revolution

Bibliography

• Ashton, T. S. The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (1948)online edition
• Farnie, Douglas Antony, and Mike Williams. Cotton Mills in Greater Manchester (1992) 212 pages
• Farnie, Douglas Antony, and David J. Jeremy. The Fibre That Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600-1990s 2004
• Giedion, Sigfried, Mechanization takes command: a contribution to anonymous history (1948) online at ACLS e-books
• Mantoux, Paul. The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century: An Outline of the Beginnings of the Modern Factory System in England (1928, 1961) online edition
• Olson, James S. Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in America (2001)
• Rider, Christine, ed. Encyclopedia of the Age of the Industrial Revolution, 1700-1920 2 vol (2007)
• Singer, Charles Joseph, ed. A history of technology: vol 4: The Industrial Revolution c 1750-c 1860 (1960) ch 4, and vol 5: The Late Nineteenth Centuiry, c 1850- c 1900, ch 3; online at ACLS e-books
• Usher, Abbott Payson. An Introduction to the Industrial History of England (1920) 529 pages online edition

Social history

• Checkland, S. G. The Rise of Industrial Society in England, 1815-1885, 1964.
• Clapham, J. H. An Economic History of Modern Britain: The Early Railway Age, 1820-1850 (1926) online edition
• Feinstein, Charles H. "Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution." Journal of Economic History 1998. 58.3: 625-658. in JSTOR
• Smelser, Neil J. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry;; (1959) online edition

United States

• Mary H. Blewett. The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910-1960 1990 online edition
• Isaac Cohen; American Management and British Labor: A Comparative Study of the Cotton Spinning Industry (1990) online edition
• Clete Daniel. Culture of Misfortune: An Interpretive History of Textile Unionism in the United States 2001 online edition
• Douglas Flamming. Creating the Modern South: Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884-1984 1992 online edition
• Cathy L. McHugh. Mill Family: The Labor System in the Southern Cotton Textile Industry, 1880-1915 (1998) online edition

Europe

• Herbert Kisch. From Domestic Manufacture to Industrial Revolution: The Case of the Rhineland Textile Districts(1989) online edition
• Tessie P. Liu; The Weaver's Knot: The Contradictions of Class Struggle and Family Solidarity in Western France, 1750-1914 1994 online edition

Primary sources

• excerpts from primary sources in Internet Modern History Sourcebook

[ online edition]