James Watt by Ben Russell

Author:Ben Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Margaret Bryan, astronomer and physicist, and her daughters, as portrayed in Bryan’s book A Compendious System of Astronomy (1797). Fashionable cotton features strongly in their apparel.

The name indelibly linked with cotton manufacture is that of Richard Arkwright. Described by Thomas Carlyle as a ‘plain, almost gross, bag-cheeked, pot-bellied Lancashire man’, he was trained as a barber in Preston, Lancashire, and most likely became acquainted with the developing cotton industry as he travelled collecting hair to make wigs.14 He worked in bursts of obsessive energy in days that sometimes began at 5 a.m. and finished at 9 p.m. Archibald Buchanan, who lived with him for a time, recalled that he was ‘so intent on his schemes’ that they ‘often sat for weeks together, on opposite sides of the fire without exchanging a syllable’.15

Arkwright’s success was based on a new type of cotton-spinning machine. Spinning relies on two processes that had always been performed by hand, one thread at a time: drafting, to tease all the cotton fibres out parallel, and then twisting, to bind them together. In 1769, the same year that Watt patented his separate condenser, Arkwright patented a machine that mechanized both of these processes: a series of pairs of rollers, each pair rotating slightly faster than the previous, pulled the cotton fibres straight and parallel, before a ‘flyer’ rotating at high speed twisted them together into a single thread.16 But just as important as the technical achievement of the machine itself is the way in which Arkwright sought to exploit it. Having built his first mill in at Nottingham, he constructed others in Derbyshire, most notably at Cromford, and at New Lanark near Glasgow. He also licensed other spinners to use the machines as long as they did so in units capable of spinning 1,000 threads simultaneously. This measure was intended to allow Arkwright control over who used the machines, by restricting their use to only the relatively small number of people who could afford to build a mill on such a large scale. However, this had the contrary effect of stimulating piracy of his production methods by rivals, albeit by building mills on the same scale if they were to compete effectively. The cotton industry exploded ‘with a vigour and activity which has no parallel’.17 The number of Arkwright-type mills increased nine-fold to 182 – with around one-third of them in Lancashire – between them capable of spinning 1,900,000 cotton threads simultaneously.18 Arkwright provided the stimulus for a new factory system.

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