Textile manufacture during the British Industrial Revolution

• 1. Introduction

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  Textile manufacture during the British Industrial Revolution can be measured in hours. In the 18th century, a worker at a hand-powered spinning wheel needed more than 50,000 hours to spin 100 pounds of cotton. By the 1790s, a spinning mule could do the same job in 300 hours. Later, with a self-acting mule, a single worker could finish it in just 135. That collapse in labour was centred on south Lancashire and the towns on both sides of the Pennines. It changed how people lived, worked and protested. Why did cotton, a newcomer beside wool and linen, become the engine of this change? Why did so many of the inventors behind it end up with so little? And what became of the families who had once spun and woven in their own cottages, once the machines moved into mills?

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• 2. Cotton Arrives

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  In the second half of the 17th century, the East India Company's new factories in South Asia began shipping finished cotton goods to British buyers in quantity. Calico and chintz garments undercut British wool and linen. Weavers, spinners, dyers, shepherds and farmers petitioned their MPs, and Parliament answered with the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721. The acts banned the import of finished pure cotton goods, and later their sale. They left a gap, though. Raw cotton could still arrive, and fustian could still be made and sold.

  About two thousand bales of raw cotton came in each year from Asia and the Americas. That supply fed a home industry making fustian, and it pushed inventors toward mechanised spinning and weaving. By the early 1770s imports had grown to seven thousand bales a year. The new mill owners pressed Parliament to lift the ban on pure cotton cloth, because they wanted to compete directly with the Company's imports.

  The competition was real. Cotton textiles from Bengal kept a competitive edge into the 19th century. British merchants answered with labour-saving machinery, while the government added bans and tariffs against Indian goods. Fine muslin shows the shift. Before the 1780s, most of the fine muslin in Britain came from India, but by the end of the 18th century British mull muslin could match it. In the 19th century, Britain overtook India as the world's leading maker of cotton textiles.

  Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow, ports on the west coast, helped decide where the industry would settle. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, plantations in the American South supplied the raw cotton. When political turmoil struck North America, in the Revolutionary War and later the American Civil War, Britain leaned harder on the Indian subcontinent instead.

  Lancashire became the heart of the young industry partly because of its weather. The damp climate suited spinning cotton yarn. Cotton thread was too weak to serve as warp, so makers used wool, linen or fustian for that role, and Lancashire was already a wool centre. Glasgow shared the same damp air. The region soon had its roads of water too. The Duke of Bridgewater's canal, opened in July 1761, linked Manchester to the coal fields of Worsley. In 1762 Matthew Boulton opened the Soho Foundry engineering works in Handsworth, Birmingham. Yet climate, ports and coal could not solve the weavers' real problem. They were running short of thread.

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• 3. Thread Before Machines

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  Before the 1760s, a typical weaving family owned a single handloom. The man worked it with a boy's help, while the wife, daughters and other women spun enough yarn to keep it busy. Cloth moved around the country by packhorse, by river navigations and by canals that followed the contours of the land.

  The knowledge behind textiles was centuries old. India had long made cotton cloth, and raw cotton exported to Europe could be turned into fustian. The stocking frame, invented in 1589, had mechanised hosiery across England over the following two centuries, and 14,000 were in use by 1750. Spinning, however, had barely changed. One design was the simple wheel, which worked in stops and starts. The other was the Saxony wheel, with a spindle, flyer and heck that guided thread onto the bobbin in one continuous motion.

  Then came John Kay of Bury, Lancashire, with his flying shuttle in the 1730s. It let a weaver produce wider cloth, and it made a loom twice as productive. Neither kind of spinning wheel could keep up with it. Workers who feared for their jobs resisted the new shuttle, which delayed its spread, yet the faster weaving still drove up demand for spun cotton.

  In 1738, Lewis Paul, one of the Huguenot weavers driven out of France by religious persecution, settled in Birmingham. With John Wyatt of that town he patented a roller spinning machine and a flyer-and-bobbin system. Two sets of rollers turning at different speeds drew the fibre out evenly before it was twisted. Their first mill, opened in 1742 and powered by a donkey, lost money and soon closed. A factory at Northampton in 1743 did better, with fifty spindles turning on five of their machines, and it ran until 1764.

  Paul also invented a hand-driven carding machine in 1748, using wire slips set around a card wrapped on a cylinder. Suspicion hung over later improvements to it, after a fire at Daniel Bourn's factory in Leominster, which used Paul and Wyatt's spindles. Bourn had taken out a similar patent that same year. In 1758 the Birmingham partners improved their roller machine and patented it again. Richard Arkwright would later take that design as the model for his water frame.

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• 4. Inventors Without Fortunes

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  In 1764, the multiple-spindle spinning jenny appeared, and James Hargreaves is the man usually credited with it. At first it multiplied one worker's thread output eightfold, and later by much more. Some give the original idea to Thomas Highs instead. Industrial unrest drove Hargreaves out of Blackburn, and his unpatented idea was taken up by others. He finally patented it in 1770. By the time he died, more than 20,000 jennies were in use, mostly without licence.

  The water frame, developed by Richard Arkwright by the end of the decade, had two important consequences. It made stronger thread, so cotton no longer depended on wool or linen for its warp. It also took spinning out of artisans' homes and into places where fast streams could drive larger machines. Arkwright built it from a spinning frame he had worked on with a different John Kay, from Warrington. Highs again claimed the original design, saying he had patented it in 1769.

  Samuel Crompton of Bolton joined the principles of the jenny and the water frame in 1779. His spinning mule made tougher, finer thread than the water frame could. Early mules suited muslin yarn, and were known as the muslin wheel or the Hall i' th' Wood wheel, pronounced Hall-ith-wood. By 1780, there were two workable spinning systems, both operated by hand and both easy to adapt to water power. Like Kay and Hargreaves, Crompton could not profit from his invention. He died a pauper.

  Weaving was next. Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom in 1784 and built a prototype the following year. His first business to exploit it failed, though others in the industry recognised his advances. Men such as Robert Grimshaw, and one named Austin, developed the idea further. Grimshaw's factory was destroyed in 1790, part of a growing backlash against the mechanising of the trade.

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• 5. Cromford

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  In 1764, Thorp Mill at Royton, Lancashire, was built as the world's first water-powered cotton mill, and it was used for carding. Long before that, John Lombe's water-powered silk mill at Derby, built in 1717, was arguably the first successful, highly mechanised factory in Britain. Cromford Mill in Derbyshire, built by Richard Arkwright in 1771, became the pattern for what followed.

  Arkwright first tried horse power to drive his frame, but a mill needed far more. The Cromford site had a year-round supply of warm water, from a sough that drained nearby lead mines and from a brook. The mill had five storeys. From 1772 it ran day and night in two 12-hour shifts.

  It opened with 200 workers, more than the locality could supply. Arkwright therefore built housing nearby, making him one of the first manufacturers to do so. Most of the workforce were women and children, the youngest only 7 years old. Later the minimum age rose to 10, and the children received 6 hours of schooling a week, so that they could keep the records their illiterate parents could not.

  Carding was the first stage of spinning, and it was originally done by hand. In 1775 Arkwright took out a second patent, for a water-powered carding machine, and output grew. He kept adding mills on the site and eventually employed 1,000 workers at Cromford. When he died in 1792, he was the wealthiest person in Britain without a title.

  Discipline was strict. The gate shut at precisely 6am and 6pm each day. A worker who missed it lost a day's pay and was fined another. In 1779, after textile workers burned down another of his mills at Birkacre, Lancashire, Arkwright installed a cannon loaded with grapeshot just inside the gate as a warning. It was never fired. His method worked, and he spread his operations to other parts of the country. Cromford Mill survives today as part of the Derwent Valley Mills, listed Grade I since June 1950.

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• 6. Power and Iron

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  As early as 1691, Thomas Savery built a vacuum steam engine, though his design was unsafe. Thomas Newcomen improved it in 1698. In 1765, James Watt added an external condenser, then a separate condenser engine in 1774 and a rotating version in 1781. In 1775 Watt's partnership with the businessman Matthew Boulton led to commercial production of the more efficient Watt engine.

  Steam first drained mines and supplied water, and only from the 1780s did it turn machines. Early engines controlled their speed badly, which snapped thread and made them poor for spinning. A workaround was to use the engine to pump water over a water wheel, which then drove the machinery. In 1783, Shudehill Mill in Manchester was built at the highest point of the city, away from the river. Its waterwheel was 30 feet across, and a steam-driven pump returned water from a lower storage pond to a higher one.

  Samuel Greg took over his uncle's textile merchant firm in 1782 and looked for a mill site. He chose the River Bollin at Styal in Cheshire, where Quarry Bank Mill began with a water wheel and added steam engines in 1810. In 1830 the average mill engine produced 48 horsepower, yet Quarry Bank installed a new 100 horsepower water wheel. In 1836, Horrocks & Nuttall of Preston took delivery of a 160 horsepower double engine.

  William Fairbairn tackled the shafts that carried power through a mill. In 1815 he replaced wooden shafts turning at 50 rpm with wrought iron ones turning at 250 rpm. They weighed a third as much and absorbed less power.

  Iron mattered as much as cotton. Coke finally replaced charcoal at every stage of smelting. Steam-driven blast air allowed hotter furnaces, and iron production surged after the 1750s as steam engines spread through ironworks. Henry Cort patented puddling in 1783 and 1784.

  Iron also reshaped the looms and mills themselves. In 1830, using a patent from 1822, Richard Roberts made the first loom with a cast-iron frame. In 1842, James Bullough and William Kenworthy built the Lancashire Loom, a semi-automatic power loom that still had to stop to refill its shuttles. It was the mainstay of Lancashire cotton for a century, until the Northrop Loom of 1894 refilled its weft automatically. The count of looms in the United Kingdom rose from 2,400 in 1803 to 14,650 in 1820-55,500 in 1829, 100,000 in 1833 and 250,000 in 1857.

  Brunswick Mill in Ancoats, Manchester, built around 1840 along the Ashton Canal, was one of the country's largest mills. Its seven-storey spinning block rose beside the canal. Cast iron columns and beams carried vaulted brick arches, with no wood in the structure, and a large double beam engine powered it. By 1850 it held 276 carding machines and 77,000 mule spindles. It converted to ring spinning in 1920 and was the first mill to take mains electricity as its main power. Production ended in 1967, and the building has been Grade II listed since June 1994.

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• 7. Life in the Mill

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  In the summer of 1787, the Calton weavers of Glasgow struck for higher wages, the first major industrial action in Scotland. Troops were called in, and three weavers were killed. Handloom weavers had worked at their own pace, with their own tools, in their own cottages. Factories set the hours, the machinery set the pace, and workers laboured on equipment they did not own. Tasks were narrowed, and women and children joined one shared production process. Factories won out because each worker produced more, prices stayed low and quality was far more consistent.

  Manchester mill owner Friedrich Engels was appalled by what he saw. He found poverty at unprecedented levels, and he judged the family itself to be "turned upside down". Women's wages undercut men's, forcing men to "sit at home" and mind the children while their wives worked long hours. His research in Derby played a large part in the book Das Kapital, written with Marx.

  In May 1808-15,000 protesters gathered on St George's Fields in Manchester, and dragoons fired on them. One man died. A strike followed and ended with a small wage increase. A strike by mule spinners at Stalybridge in 1824 had a different effect. Owners wanted to power the push of the mule's winding stroke, which spinners still did by hand, and in 1830 Richard Roberts patented the first self-acting mule. Semiskilled labour could now run it. Before 1830, a spinner worked a partially powered mule of at most 400 spindles, but self-acting mules could now have up to 1,300. In the general strike of 1842, half a million workers demanded the Charter and an end to pay cuts. Troops were called in and the strike leaders arrested, though some demands were met.

  Children were the hardest-used workers. In 1788, two-thirds of the workers in 143 water-powered cotton mills across England and Scotland were described as children. Children began at around four, working under the moving machinery as mule scavengers until eight. They then became little piecers until 15, working 14 to 16 hours a day and beaten if they fell asleep. Many were sent from workhouses in London and other southern towns to mills in Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire. Litton Mill is a well-documented example.

  Sir Robert Peel, a mill owner turned reformer, promoted the 1802 Health and Morals of Apprentices Act, meant to stop pauper children working more than 12 hours a day. Further laws followed. By 1835 the share of cotton mill workers under 18 in England and Scotland had fallen to 43%. Even so, about half the workers surveyed in the Manchester and Stockport cotton factories in 1818 and 1819 had started before the age of ten. Most adult mill workers in the mid-19th century had begun as children, and the growth of that experienced adult workforce helps explain the shift away from child labour.

  Writers took the mills as a subject. William Blake wrote "And did those feet in ancient time", known as "Jerusalem", in 1804. Mrs Gaskell published Mary Barton in 1848 and North and South in 1855, and Charlotte Brontë published Shirley in 1849.

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• 8. Secrets Abroad

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  In 1788, on the 18th of August, the Beverly Cotton Manufactory started up in Beverly, Massachusetts, the first American cotton mill to run on horse power. Britain guarded its textile know-how closely. Engineers who could build mills and machinery were not allowed to emigrate, especially to the young United States.

  The Beverly mill was started by John Cabot and his brothers, jointly with Moses Brown, Israel Thorndike, Joshua Fisher, Henry Higginson and Deborah Higginson Cabot. The Salem Mercury reported that by April 1788 its equipment was complete, with a spinning jenny, a carding machine, a warping machine and other tools. The site, in the rural outskirts of North Beverly, had natural water, but it served to keep the horses and clean the equipment rather than to power production. The owners hid the internal designs from competitors. They even set up experimental milling equipment on their own estates, and no published article described the process in detail. Soon water-powered methods dwarfed the horse-driven mill.

  In 1789, Samuel Slater slipped past the ban. He had been an apprentice to Jedediah Strutt, Arkwright's partner, and he carried his skill in designing and building factories to New England. There he began reproducing the textile mills that would power America's own industrial revolution. Local invention helped. In 1793 Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, which sped up the processing of raw cotton by more than 50 times.

  In the mid-1800s, some of the technology and tools were sold to Russia. The Morozov family, well-known 19th-century Russian merchants, set up 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. With his family's help, he widened the business into one of the most profitable in the Russian Empire.

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