Gale Researcher Guide for: Industrial Textile Production by Gay L. Gullickson

Author:Gay L. Gullickson [Gullickson, Gay L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

New Technologies

As the eighteenth century progressed, the invention of machines designed primarily to increase both the quantity and quality of cotton yarn made the manufacture of pure cotton fabric possible. Textile machines were not new in the eighteenth century. In 1589 William Lee (c. 1563–c. 1614) invented a stocking frame for knitting. By the end of the seventeenth century, it had all but eliminated hand knitting. In 1604 William Dircxz van Sonnevelt (c. 1575–1628) invented a ribbon frame that allowed one person to weave twelve ribbons at a time, and in the 1600s Italians invented a machine for throwing silk that revolutionized silk manufacturing. At considerable risk, the plans for these machines were smuggled into England in 1717. Not all machines were immediately successful. The flying shuttle (1733) invented by John Kay (1704–c. 1779) was slow to catch on because it speeded up weaving, which already consumed yarn faster than women could spin it. The spinning frame (1738) produced by John Wyatt (1700–1766) and Lewis Paul (d. 1759) was equally unsuccessful, but by mid-century the cultural climate was ready for innovation. The carding machines invented by Paul and others in the 1750s, the spinning jenny (c. 1764) by James Hargreaves (1721–1778), the spinning frame (1769; also known as the water frame) of Richard Arkwright (1732–1792), and the mule (1779) of Samuel Crompton (1753–1827) made it possible to produce stronger and finer cotton thread than ever before.

With machinery came factories and the growth of cotton cities. Between 1760 and 1830, for instance, the population of Manchester, England, increased from 17,000 to 180,000. Edmund Cartwright (1743–1823) devised a power loom in the 1780s, but its advantages over hand weaving were slight, and the adoption of mechanical weaving came much more slowly than the adoption of mechanical carding and spinning. Finishing processes were also transformed. Chemicals replaced the sun as bleaching agents (sulfuric acid in 1756; chlorine in the 1790s), and cylinder printing replaced the old block press (1783).

Almost all these machines were invented for the cotton trade, but they could be and were adapted for use in the production of wool fabric. Worsteds adapted more easily to the new technology than woolens did. The spinning frame was used to spin long-staple wool for worsteds. Short-staple wool used in woolens was more fragile and much more difficult to spin by machine, although it, too, was being spun by jennies by the 1780s. The same was true of mechanical weaving when it spread in the nineteenth century. Stronger threads made it easier to weave worsteds than woolens.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the textile industries of Europe were moving rapidly into the industrial era. The era of cotton had begun; worsteds were outpacing woolens; factory production was returning manufacturing to the cities; and markets had expanded well beyond the luxury trade of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

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