Curated playlist
History of the textile industry
- Roberts LoomThe Roberts loom arrived in 1830, and within a few years it had helped push the number of power looms across Britain from around 55,500 to 100,000. Richard Roberts, working out of 15 Deansgate in Manchester, had built something the textile…
- Spinning (textiles)Spinning (textiles) is one of humanity's oldest technologies. Around 50,000-40,000 BCE, in what is now southern France, someone twisted together strands of fiber. That object, the oldest known twisted fiber on Earth, survived long enough…
- Beverly Cotton ManufactoryBeverly Cotton Manufactory stands as the first cotton mill ever built in America, and the largest of its kind at the time of its construction. Before a single bolt of cloth left its doors, port records in Beverly, Massachusetts show…
- Cotton-spinning machineryCotton-spinning machinery transformed how human beings clothe themselves. Before the 18th century, every length of yarn in every garment on every body in Europe was pulled from raw fiber by a pair of human hands. Then, within a single…
- Lowell, MassachusettsLowell, Massachusetts sits at a bend in the Merrimack River where the water drops 32 feet over a mile of rapids, and for most of American history, that fall of water determined the fate of hundreds of thousands of people. In 1860, Lowell…
- Pawtucket, Rhode IslandPawtucket, Rhode Island sits at the edge of a river that once powered a revolution. Not a political one, but an industrial one. At the falls of the Blackstone River, a city grew from a single sawmill into a place that would change how…
- Textile manufacture during the British Industrial RevolutionIn 1734, John Kay stood in a workshop in Bury, Lancashire, and invented the flying shuttle. This device allowed a single weaver to produce cloth twice as fast as before. The invention widened the fabric and sped up production, yet it…
- CromfordThe River Derwent flows southward from its sources on Bleaklow in the Dark Peak. This fast-moving water has cut a deep valley through limestone geology in the Derbyshire Dales. The stream known as Ivonbrook runs through the Via Gellia…
- Slater MillSlater Mill stands on the banks of the Blackstone River in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and it holds a distinction most Americans have never heard of: it was the first property listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That…
- CottonopolisCottonopolis stood at the center of an industrial web without parallel in the 19th century. Within 12 miles of Manchester's center, 280 towns and villages had organized themselves around the cotton trade. Lancashire held four million…
- Uxbridge, MassachusettsUxbridge, Massachusetts sits at the midpoint of the Blackstone Valley, 36 miles southwest of Boston, and it has been quietly collecting firsts for nearly four centuries. The first colonial woman to vote in America cast her ballot here. The…