Textile manufacture during the British Industrial Revolution
Textile manufacture during the British Industrial Revolution was centred in south
Before the 18th century, the manufacture of cloth was performed by individual workers, in the premises in which they lived and goods were transported around the country by packhorses or by river navigations and contour-following canals that had been constructed in the early 18th century. In the mid-18th century, artisans were inventing ways to become more productive. Silk, wool, and linen fabrics were being eclipsed by cotton which became the most important textile.
Innovations in
Elements of the Industrial Revolution
The commencement of the Industrial Revolution is closely linked to a small number of innovations, made in the second half of the 18th century:[1]
- John Kay's 1733 flying shuttle enabled cloth to be woven faster, of a greater width, and for the process to later be mechanised. Cotton spinning using Richard Arkwright's water frame, James Hargreaves' Spinning Jenny, and Samuel Crompton's Spinning Mule (a combination of the Spinning Jenny and the Water Frame). This was patented in 1769 and so came out of patent in 1783. The end of the patent was rapidly followed by the erection of many cotton mills. Similar technology was subsequently applied to spinning worsted yarn for various textiles and flax for linen.
- The improved steam engine invented by James Watt and patented in 1775 was initially mainly used for pumping out mines, for water supply systems and to a lesser extend to power air blast for blast furnaces, but from the 1780s was applied to power machines. This enabled rapid development of efficient semi-automated factories on a previously unimaginable scale in places where waterpower was not available or not steady throughout the seasons. Early steam engines had poor speed control, which caused thread breakage, limiting their use in operations like spinning; however, this problem could be overcome by using the engine to pump water over a water wheel to drive the machinery.[2][3]
- In the Iron industry, coke was finally applied to all stages of iron smelting, replacing charcoal. This had been achieved much earlier for lead and copper as well as for producing pig iron in a blast furnace, but the second stage in the production of bar iron depended on the use of potting and stamping (for which a patent expired in 1786) or puddling (patented by Henry Cort in 1783 and 1784). Using a steam engine to power blast air to blast furnaces made higher furnace temperatures possible, which allowed the use of more lime to tie up sulfur in coal or coke. The steam engine also overcame the shortage of water power for iron works. Iron production surged after the 1750s when steam engines were increasingly employed in iron works.[4]
These represent three 'leading sectors', in which there were key innovations, which allowed the economic takeoff by which the Industrial Revolution is usually defined. Later inventions such as the power loom and Richard Trevithick's high pressure steam engine were also important in the growing industrialisation of Britain. The application of steam engines to powering cotton mills and ironworks enabled these to be built in places that were most convenient because other resources were available, rather than where there was water to power a watermill.
Industry and invention
Before the 1760s, textile production was a
The knowledge of textile production had existed for centuries. India had a textile industry that used cotton, from which it manufactured cotton textiles. When raw cotton was exported to Europe it could be used to make fustian.[5]
Two systems had developed for spinning: the
Cloth production moved away from the cottage into manufactories. The first moves towards manufactories called mills were made in the spinning sector. The move in the weaving sector was later. By the 1820s, all cotton, wool, and worsted was spun in mills; but this yarn went to outworking weavers who continued to work in their own homes. A mill that specialized in weaving fabric was called a weaving shed.
Early inventions
East India Company
During the second half of the 17th century, the newly established factories of the
The exemption of raw cotton saw two thousand bales of cotton being imported annually, from Asia and the Americas, and forming the basis of a new indigenous industry, initially producing Fustian for the domestic market, though more importantly triggering the development of a series of mechanised spinning and weaving technologies, to process the material. This mechanised production was concentrated in new cotton mills, which slowly expanded till by the beginning of the 1770s seven thousand bales of cotton were imported annually, and pressure was put on Parliament, by the new mill owners, to remove the prohibition on the production and sale of pure cotton cloth, as they wished to compete with the EIC imports.[5]
Indian cotton textiles, mainly those from
Britain
During the 18th and 19th centuries, much of the imported cotton came from plantations in the American South. In periods of political uncertainty in North America, during the Revolutionary War and later American Civil War, however, Britain relied more heavily on imports from the Indian subcontinent to supply its cotton manufacturing industry. Ports on the west coast of Britain, such as Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow, became important in determining the sites of the cotton industry.[citation needed]
The early advances in weaving had been halted by the lack of thread. The spinning process was slow and the weavers needed more cotton and wool thread than their families could produce. In the 1760s,
The textile industry was also to benefit from other developments of the period. As early as 1691, Thomas Savery had made a vacuum steam engine. His design, which was unsafe, was improved by Thomas Newcomen in 1698. In 1765, James Watt further modified Newcomen's engine to design an external condenser steam engine. Watt continued to make improvements on his design, producing a separate condenser engine in 1774 and a rotating separate condensing engine in 1781. Watt formed a partnership with businessman Matthew Boulton, and together they manufactured steam engines which could be used by industry.
Prior to the 1780s, most of the fine quality cotton muslin in circulation in Britain had been manufactured in India. Due to advances in technique, British "mull muslin" was able to compete in quality with Indian muslin by the end of the 18th century.[10]
Timeline of inventions
In 1734 in
In 1738,
1742: Paul and Wyatt opened a mill in Birmingham which used their new rolling machine powered by donkey; this was not profitable and was soon closed.
1743: A factory opened in Northampton, fifty spindles turned on five of Paul and Wyatt's machines proving more successful than their first mill. This operated until 1764.
1748: Lewis Paul invented the hand driven carding machine. A coat of wire slips were placed around a card which was then wrapped around a cylinder. Lewis's invention was later developed and improved by Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton, although this came about under great suspicion after a fire at Daniel Bourn's factory in Leominster which specifically used Paul and Wyatt's spindles. Bourn produced a similar patent in the same year.
1758: Paul and Wyatt based in Birmingham improved their roller spinning machine and took out a second patent. Richard Arkwright later used this as the model for his water frame.
Start of the Revolution
The Duke of Bridgewater's canal connected Manchester to the coal fields of Worsley. It was opened in July 1761. Matthew Boulton opened the Soho Foundry engineering works in Handsworth, Birmingham in 1762. These were both events that enabled cotton mill construction and the move away from home-based production. In 1764, Thorp Mill the first water-powered cotton mill in the world was constructed at Royton, Lancashire, England. It was used for carding cotton.[12]
The multiple spindle spinning jenny was invented in 1764.
Matthew Boulton partnership with Scottish engineer James Watt resulted, in 1775, in the commercial production of the more efficient Watt steam engine which used a separate condensor.
Samuel Crompton of Bolton combined elements of the spinning jenny and water frame in 1779, creating the spinning mule. This mule produced a stronger thread than the water frame could. Thus in 1780, there were two viable hand-operated spinning systems that could be easily adapted to run by power of water.[15] Early mules were suitable for producing yarn for use in the manufacture of muslin, and were known as the muslin wheel or the Hall i' th' Wood (pronounced Hall-ith-wood) wheel. As with Kay and Hargreaves, Crompton was not able to exploit his invention for his own profit, and died a pauper.
In 1783 a mill was built in Manchester at Shudehill, at the highest point in the city away from the river.
In 1784, Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom,[11] and produced a prototype in the following year. His initial venture to exploit this technology failed, although his advances were recognised by others in the industry. Others such as Robert Grimshaw (whose factory was destroyed in 1790 as part of the growing reaction against the mechanization of the industry) and Austin[17] – developed the ideas further.
In the 1790s industrialists, such as John Marshall at Marshall's Mill in Leeds, started to work on ways to apply some of the techniques which had proved so successful in cotton to other materials, such as flax.
In 1803, William Radcliffe invented the dressing frame which was patented under the name of Thomas Johnson which enabled power looms to operate continuously.
Later developments
With the Cartwright Loom, the Spinning Mule and the Boulton & Watt steam engine, the pieces were in place to build a mechanised textile industry. From this point there were no new inventions, but a continuous improvement in technology as the mill-owner strove to reduce cost and improve quality. Developments in the transport infrastructure - the canals and, after 1831, the railways - facilitated the import of raw materials and export of finished cloth.
The use of water power to drive mills was supplemented by steam driven water pumps, and then superseded completely by the steam engines. For example, Samuel Greg joined his uncle's firm of textile merchants, and, on taking over the company in 1782, he sought out a site to establish a mill. Quarry Bank Mill was built on the River Bollin at Styal in Cheshire. It was initially powered by a water wheel, but installed steam engines in 1810.[a] In 1830, the average power of a mill engine was 48 hp, but Quarry Bank mill installed a new 100 hp water wheel.[18] This was to change in 1836, when Horrocks & Nuttall, Preston took delivery of 160 hp double engine. William Fairbairn addressed the problem of line-shafting and was responsible for improving the efficiency of the mill. In 1815 he replaced the wooden turning shafts that drove the machines at 50rpm, to wrought iron shafting working at 250 rpm, these were a third of the weight of the previous ones and absorbed less power.[18] The mill operated until 1959.
Robert's power loom
In 1830, using an 1822 patent, Richard Roberts manufactured the first loom with a cast-iron frame, the Roberts Loom.[11] In 1842 James Bullough and William Kenworthy, made the Lancashire Loom. It is a semiautomatic power loom. Although it is self-acting, it has to be stopped to recharge empty shuttles. It was the mainstay of the Lancashire cotton industry for a century, when the Northrop Loom invented in 1894 with an automatic weft replenishment function gained ascendancy.
Year | 1803 | 1820 | 1829 | 1833 | 1857 |
Looms | 2,400 | 14,650 | 55,500 | 100,000 | 250,000 |
Robert's self acting mule
Also in 1830, Richard Roberts patented the first self-acting mule. The Stalybridge mule spinners strike was in 1824, this stimulated research into the problem of applying power to the winding stroke of the mule.[20][21] The draw while spinning had been assisted by power, but the push of the wind had been done manually by the spinner, the mule could be operated by semiskilled labour. Before 1830, the spinner would operate a partially powered mule with a maximum of 400 spindles after, self-acting mules with up to 1,300 spindles could be built.[22]
The savings that could be made with this technology were considerable. A worker spinning cotton at a hand-powered spinning wheel in the 18th century would take more than 50,000 hours to spin 100 lb of cotton; by the 1790s, the same quantity could be spun in 300 hours by mule, and with a self-acting mule it could be spun by one worker in just 135 hours.[23]
Working practices
The nature of work changed during industrialisation from a craft production model to a factory-centric model. It was during the years 1761 to 1850 that these changes happened. Textile factories organized workers' lives much differently from craft production. Handloom
The early
A representative early spinning mill 1771
Cromford Mill was an early Arkwright mill and was the model for future mills. The site at Cromford had year-round supply of warm water from the sough which drained water from nearby lead mines, together with another brook. It was a five-storey mill. Starting in 1772, the mills ran day and night with two 12-hour shifts.
It started with 200 workers, more than the locality could provide so Arkwright built housing for them nearby, one of the first manufacturers to do so. Most of the employees were women and children, the youngest being only 7 years old. Later, the minimum age was raised to 10 and the children were given 6 hours of education a week, so that they could do the record keeping their illiterate parents could not.
The first stage of the spinning process is carding, initially this was done by hand, but in 1775 he took out a second patent for a water-powered carding machine and this led to increased output. He was soon building further mills on this site and eventually employed 1,000 workers at Cromford. By the time of his death in 1792, he was the wealthiest untitled person in Britain.[30] The gate to Cromford Mill was shut at precisely 6am and 6pm every day and any worker who failed to get through it not only lost a day's pay but was fined another day's pay. In 1779, Arkwright installed a cannon, loaded with grapeshot, just inside the factory gate,[31] as a warning to would-be rioting textile workers, who had burned down another of his mills in Birkacre, Lancashire. The cannon was never used.
The mill structure is classified as a
A representative mid-century spinning mill 1840
Brunswick Mill, Ancoats is a cotton spinning mill in Ancoats, Manchester, Greater Manchester. It was built around 1840, part of a group of mills built along the Ashton Canal, and at that time it was one of the country's largest mills. It was built round a quadrangle, a seven-storey block faced the canal.[33] It was taken over by the Lancashire Cotton Corporation in the 1930s and passed to Courtaulds in 1964. Production finished in 1967.
The Brunswick mill was built around 1840 in one phase.[33] The main seven storey block that faces the Ashton Canal was used for spinning. The preparation was done on the second floor and the self-acting mules with 400 spindles were arranged transversely on the floors above. The wings contained the blowing rooms, some spinning and ancillary processes like winding. The four storey range facing Bradford Road was used for warehousing and offices. The mill was built by David Bellhouse, but it is suspected that William Fairbairn was involved in the design. It is built from brick, and has slate roofs. Fireproof internal construction was now standard. Brunswick was built using cast iron columns and beams, each floor was vaulted with transverse brick arches.[34] There was no wood in the structure. It was powered by a large double beam engine.[33]
In 1850 the mill had some 276 carding machines, and 77,000 mule spindles,[35] 20 drawing frames, fifty slubbing frames and eighty one roving frames.[36]
The structure was good and it successfully converted to ring spinning in 1920- and was the first mill to adopt mains electricity as its principal source of power. The mill structure was classified as a
Export of technology
While profiting from expertise arriving from overseas (e.g.
- Horse power (1780–1790)
The earliest cotton mills in the
Much of the internal designs of the Beverly mill were hidden due to concerns of competitors stealing designs. The beginning efforts were all researched behind closed doors, even to the point that the owners of the mill set up milling equipment on their estates to experiment with the process. There were no published articles describing exactly how their process worked in detail. Additionally, the mill's horse-powered technology was quickly dwarfed by new water-powered methods.[39][40]
- Slater
Following the creation of the United States, an engineer who had worked as an apprentice to Arkwright's partner
Local inventions spurred this on, and in 1793 Eli Whitney invented and patented the cotton gin, which sped up the processing of raw cotton by over 50 times.
1800s
In the mid-1800s some of the technology and tools were sold and exported to Russia.[41] The Morozovs family, a well known 19th-century Russian merchant and textile family established a private company in central Russia that produced dyed fabrics on an industrial scale. Savva Morozov studied the process at the University of Cambridge in England and later, with the help of his family, widened his family's business and made it one of the most profitable in the Russian Empire.[41]
Art and literature
- William Blake: "And did those feet in ancient time", also known as "Jerusalem", (1804) and other works.
- North and South(1855)
- Charlotte Brontë: Shirley (1849)
- Cynthia Harrod-Eagles wrote fictional accounts of the early days of factories and the events of the Industrial Revolution in The Maiden (1985), The Flood Tide (1986), The Tangled Thread (1987), The Emperor (1988), The Victory (1989), The Regency (1990), The Reckoning (1992) and The Devil's Horse (1993), Volumes 8-13, 15 and 16 of The Morland Dynasty.
- Textile workshops and the Calico Acts are featured in the board game John Company.
See also
- Textile manufacturing by pre-industrial methods
- Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life
References
- Footnotes
- ^ Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire still exists as a well-preserved museum. It illustrates how the mill owners used child labour, taking orphans from nearby Manchester; it shows working conditions and how children were housed, clothed, fed and provided with some education. This mill also shows the transition from water power to steam power; steam engines to drive the looms being installed in 1810.
- Notes
- ^ The Industrial Revolution – Innovations
- ISBN 978-0-86341-047-5.
- ISBN 978-0-8018-9141-0.
- ISBN 978-0901462886.
- ^ a b c d e Broadberry, Stephen; Gupta, Bishnupriya. "Cotton textiles and the great divergence: Lancashire, India and shifting competitive advantage, 1600-1850" (PDF). International Institute of Social History. Department of Economics, University of Warwick. Retrieved 5 December 2016.
- ISBN 978-1-317-13522-7.
- ISBN 978-0-19-516520-3.
- ISBN 978-1-136-82552-1.
- ^ Mill, James; Wilson, Horace Hayman (1844). The History of British India. Vol. 7th. London: James Madden. pp. 538–539.
- ^ Gail Marsh, 19th Century Embroidery Techniques (Guild of Master Craftsman Publications Ltd, 2008), p. 70.
- ^ a b c Williams & Farnie 1992, p. 11.
- ^ Mortimer, John (1897), Industrial Lancashire
- ^ Grimshaw Archived 2005-10-29 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ [1]: Press the 'Ingenious' button and use search key '10302171' for the patent
- ^ a b Hills 1993, p. 43
- ^ Hills 1993, p. 44
- ^ Guest source
- ^ a b Hills 1993, p. 113
- ^ Hills 1993, p. 117
- ^ Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. .
- ^ Hills 1993, p. 118
- ^ Williams & Farnie 1992, p. 9.
- ^ Griffin, Emma (2010). A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution. Palgrave. p. 91.
- ^ Cora Granata and Cheryl A. Koos, Modern Europe 1750 to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008) 31.
- ^ George MacGregor (1881). The history of Glasgow: from the earliest period to the present time. T. D. Morison. pp. 371–372.
- ^ WORKERS: The long agony of the handloom weaver, Cotton Times, 2010, retrieved 9 February 2010
- ^ "General Strike, 1842 Half a million workers demand the Charter and an end to pay cuts". Chartist Ancestors. Retrieved 9 February 2010.
- ^ Rowland, David (1832), Children of the Revolution, Cotton Times, archived from the original on 17 August 2010, retrieved 9 February 2010
- S2CID 5858814.
- ^ Thornber, Craig. "RICHARD ARKWRIGHT (1732-1792)". Cheshire Antiquities. Retrieved 2 February 2015.
- ^ Cotton Times website
- ^ Historic England, "Cromford Mill (1248010)", National Heritage List for England, retrieved 1 February 2014
- ^ a b c Williams & Farnie 1992, pp. 154–156.
- ^ a b Historic England, "Brunswick Mill (1197807)", National Heritage List for England, retrieved 12 May 2014
- ^ "Graces guides, Brunswick Mill". Retrieved 10 January 2009.
- ISBN 978-0-7190-5606-2.
- ^ Beverly Community History Cotton Mill, www.globalindex.com. URL accessed January 14, 2007.
- ^ The Worcester (Mass.) Spy. August 31, 1897, Wednesday. Page 2
- ^ The Beverly Cotton Manufactory: Or some new light on an early cotton mill. Robert W Lovett. Business Historical Society. Bulletin of the Business Historical Society pre.. Dec 1952; 26, 000004; ABI/INFORM(pg. 218)
- ^ "Made In Beverly-A History of Beverly Industry", by Daniel J. Hoisington. A publication of the Beverly Historic District Commission. 1989.
- ^ a b "The Morozovs: A merchant dynasty". 8 August 2020.
- Bibliography
- Copeland, Melvin Thomas. The cotton manufacturing industry of the United States (Harvard University Press, 1912) online
- Cameron, Edward H. Samuel Slater, Father of American Manufactures (1960) scholarly biography
- Conrad Jr, James L. (1995). "'Drive That Branch': Samuel Slater, the Power Loom, and the Writing of America's Textile History". Technology and Culture. 36 (1): 1–28. S2CID 112131140.
- Griffin, Emma, A Short History of the British Industrial Revolution (Palgrave, 2010), pp. 86–104
- Griffiths, T.; Hunt, P.A.; O'Brien, P. K. (1992). "Inventive activity in the British textile industry". Journal of Economic History. 52: 881–906. S2CID 154338291.
- Griffiths, Trevor; Hunt, Philip; O'Brien, Patrick (2008). "Scottish, Irish, and imperial connections: Parliament, the three kingdoms, and the mechanization of cotton spinning in eighteenth-century Britain". Economic History Review. 61 (3): 625–650. S2CID 144918748.
- ISBN 9780521458344, retrieved 12 June 2010
- Miller, Ian; Wild, Chris (2007), A & G Murray and the Cotton Mills of Ancoats, Lancaster Imprints, ISBN 978-0-904220-46-9
- Ray, Indrajit (2011). Bengal Industries and the British Industrial Revolution (1757-1857), ISBN 1136825525.
- Tucker, Barbara M. "The Merchant, the Manufacturer, and the Factory Manager: The Case of Samuel Slater," Business History Review, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Autumn, 1981), pp. 297–313 in JSTOR
- Tucker, Barbara M. Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790–1860 (1984)
- Williams, Mike; Farnie, Douglas Anthony (1992), Cotton Mills of Greater Manchester, Carnegie Publishing, ISBN 0948789697