The Life and Times of Francis Cabot Lowell, 1775-1817 by Rosenberg Chaim M.;

Author:Rosenberg, Chaim M.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Textile Industry of Great Britain

The industrial revolution had gathered momentum for thirty years before Francis Cabot Lowell arrived in Great Britain. Before the introduction of machinery, the dressing, carding, spinning and weaving of cotton was done by hand in the cottages of the workers. The wives and daughters spun the yarn and the men folk wove the yarn into cloth, bought up for sale in the market places of the towns. Hundreds of thousands in the villages and towns of England and Scotland earned their keep in the home-craft textile industry. These textile workers made a decent living, supplemented by the produce of their gardens and milk from their cows.

The traditional methods of home spinning changed after 1764 with James Hargreaves’ invention of the spinning jenny. Born in the village of Stanhill, near Blackburn in Lancashire, Hargreaves worked as a weaver until he devised a machine that could spin several threads at the same time. Three years later, Richard Arkwright, a wig-maker by occupation, from Preston in Lancashire, improved on the jenny with his water-powered spinning throstle. The illiterate and humble James Hargreaves and the energetic Richard Arkwright were the men at the forefront of the British industrial revolution.

Richard Arkwright proved the better businessman. Despite the riots that followed the introduction of his spinning machine, Arkwright formed a company to build textile mills. The first Arkwright mill, powered by river water, opened in 1771. The next great technological advance in cotton spinning came from Samuel Crompton of Bolton in Lancashire with his mule, so called because it combined the functions of the spinning jenny and the throstle. Crompton’s machine could spin a yarn so fine as to make muslin cloth. The machines devised by Hargreaves, Arkwright and Crompton were very heavy and required sturdily built factories to hold them. Manufacturers found it economical to build large factories with a single waterwheel, giving great impetus to the factory as the preferred system for spinning cotton. The manufacturer owned the mill, machinery and the raw materials. With the coming of the factory system the worker sold his labor for whatever price the marketplace offered.

In 1786, David Dale and Richard Arkwright founded the village of New Lanark, some thirty-five miles southwest of Edinburgh, where they built cotton mills using the power of the River Clyde. By the 1780s the British cotton spinning factories provided the quarter million weavers of the nation with an unlimited supply of yarn at reasonable prices. So pleased was the British government with the invention of the water frame that, in 1787, they awarded Richard Arkwright the majestic sum of £10,000. That year, there were already 143 textile mills in Great Britain.

The power to turn the machines in the factories came at first from horses moving in rotation. With the invention of the waterwheel, power came from the rivers and streams. In England, with slower rivers, the steam engine, first installed in 1785, rapidly became the preferred source of power.

Edmund Cartwright’s power loom was the next great advance in textile machinery.

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