The History of England, Volume 4 by Peter Ackroyd

Author:Peter Ackroyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

22

The magical machines

Two brothers, John and Thomas Lombe, erected a manufactory in 1719 on an island in the River Derwent. It housed a silk engine which became the subject of popular curiosity and amazement, ‘a new invention’ combining, according to the original patent, ‘three sorts of engines never before made or used in Great Britain, one to wind the finest raw silk, another to spin, and the other to twist . . .’. An application for the renewal of the patent, fourteen years later, referred to ‘97,746 wheels, movements and individual parts (which work day and night)’. Malachy Postlethwayt, in his The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, reported ‘this little being, not above five or six feet in height, with two arms, will dispatch as much work as a giant’.

The genteel came in coaches from all over the county to witness the marvel. The manufactory, a stone edifice of five storeys, was powered by a large water-wheel; within the building tall cylindrical machines whirred and rotated. One man was responsible for sixty threads. It was the principal sight of Derby and, with its machinery, its continuous operation and its specialized workforce, can be considered as the prototype for the silk mills and cotton mills of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was said that the Lombes had stolen the idea from Italy, and that as a result John Lombe was poisoned in 1722, but this was no doubt part of the romance of the new age. By the early nineteenth century it sat on the landscape with all the authority of an ancient monument.

Other wonders abounded. Daniel Defoe, writing in the year after the silk mill was constructed, remarked upon the ‘new undertakings in trade, inventions, engines, manufactures, in a nation pushing and improving as we are’. There was yet no concept of the factory as a powerhouse; it was generally used to describe a building inhabited by foreign merchants. But these solid, grim edifices began to enter social and economic calculations. Matthew Boulton completed his Soho manufactory, on Handsworth Heath in north-east Birmingham, in 1769; it was used for the manufacture of various ‘toys’ or small goods such as buckles and buttons. The main warehouse was nineteen bays wide, and three storeys high, with a Palladian front. But it looked more like a prison than a country house. This was the site where in 1776 James Watt began the manufacture of steam engines. Seven years before, Watt’s separate condenser and Richard Arkwright’s water-frame had been granted patents; new engines powered by steam could now be developed, and the water-frame could create miles of inexpensive cotton for cheaper and cheaper clothing.

Again in 1769, at a time when the political world was exercised by ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’, Josiah Wedgwood opened his vast pottery works of some 350 acres beside the Trent and Mersey Canal in Staffordshire and named it Etruria in homage to its classical predecessors; thus the factory could be given the illusion of a picturesque past, even if its principles were thoroughly modern.

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