During the Industrial Revolution (-), textile production was transformed from a cottage industry to a highly mechanised one where workers were present only to make sure the carding, spinning, and weaving machines never stopped. Driven by the desire to cut costs, a long line of inventors ensured that machine factories were cheaper, faster, and more reliable than ever before.
The adoption of machines, typically powered by water wheels and then steam engines, meant that many skilled textile workers lost their employment, which led to protest movements such as those by the Luddites. Although new, less skilled jobs were created, the poor working conditions in the textile mills helped form the trade union movement and spur governments to pass laws that protected the well-being of those who ensured the machines kept on spinning.
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Power Looms in a Textile Mill
Traditionally, yarn and cloth were bought from spinners and weavers who worked in their own homes or in small workshops. It was common for a family to divide the work, with children washing and then carding the wool, women spinning the yarn using a manual spinning wheel, and men weaving the cloth using a hand-powered loom.
It was the lure of making more money that drove the move away from manual to machine labour.
Production was greatly speeded up in when John Kay invented the flying shuttle, used to pull thread horizontally (weft) across longitudinal threads (warp) on a weaving frame. The shuttle, knocked across the worked material by a hammer, also permitted wider textiles to be made. The problem now was how to spin more yarn to keep pace with the faster weaving stage. The traditional spinning wheel was an efficient machine but could only spin one thread at a time. Consequently, inventors attempted to create machines that could spin multiple threads simultaneously. This would allow one operator to effectively do the work of several people. In addition, if many machines were all put in one place ' a factory or mill ' then production costs could be further reduced. As in many other areas of the Industrial Revolution, it was the lure of making more money that drove the move away from manual to machine labour.
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Flying Shuttle
There were many inventors and machines that pushed the textile industry forwards during the Industrial Revolution, but the most important include:
James Hargreaves (-) invented the spinning jenny (machine) in Lancashire in (patented in ). The machine ' essentially a spinning frame containing multiple spindles ' could spin eight cotton threads at the same time, and so the potential to dramatically speed up production and cut labour costs attracted business owners. Hargreaves soon improved his jenny so that a single machine could spin 120 threads simultaneously. This evolution more than made up for the higher cost of a jenny compared to a traditional spinning wheel (70 shillings against one shilling). By , factories across Britain were using over 20,000 spinning jennies. There was no going back to the old cottage industry of isolated workers in their homes, especially as many of the machines used large water wheels for their power.
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Traditional textile workers immediately saw the threat of Hargreaves' jenny and smashed any examples they could find and, in some cases, even burnt down factories. Meanwhile, jennies were introduced to France directly from Lancashire from , although they did not quite take off as they had in Britain, despite the French state subsidising their adoption. The reason may be due to wages being lower in France and so the expensive machines were a less attractive proposition for entrepreneurs. The same could also be true for India, where labour was cheaper still and where the jenny was largely ignored.
Spinning Jenny, Chemnitz
Richard Arkwright (-), a Lancashire wigmaker, created the first water frame, a device patented in . Arkwright was crucially assisted by his friend John Kay, a clockmaker (not the flying shuttle inventor) who, over a period of five years, helped him perfect the right materials to use in the machine and the gears that made it work efficiently, replacing the more cumbersome system of levers and belts. As the economic historian R. C. Allen notes, "without watch-makers, the water frame could not have been designed" (204). Britain was at the forefront of watchmaking technology, and this again explains why it was here and not in other countries where the early textile machinery was pioneered. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the heart of the British clock industry was in Lancashire, precisely where the mechanised textile industry took off.
Arkwright's water frame was a cotton-spinning machine where rollers performed the task that fingers and thumbs once had. It was an improvement on the spinning jenny since it produced much finer and stronger yarn. An early version was powered by a single horse and could spin 96 spindles at once. As the fully-developed machine in Arkwright's factory in Cromford on the River Derwent (far away from any textile workers for his own safety and that of his machines) was powered by a water wheel, it could run indefinitely and more smoothly than hand-worked machines.
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Arkwright's Water Frame
The version of Arkwright's water frame had 129 spindles and was operated by women since skilled male textile workers were no longer needed. The factory model of Cromford with its machines, layout, rationalised production process, provision of power on multiple floors, and full-time operations was copied in factories across the north of England, with Arkwright making a fortune by insisting buyers order no fewer than 1,000 of his machines at a time (or more accurately, the right to build them). The Cromford factory model was copied, too, in the United States and Germany. Arkwright also greatly improved his wealth by inventing a carding machine (patented in ), an invention that provided better quality source material for the spinning machines. The carding machine actually cut labour costs far more than the water frame.
Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule in , an improved combination of Hargreaves' jenny and Arkwright's water frame that made finer and more uniform yarn. The machine could measure up to 46 metres (150 ft) in length and massively increased the number of available spindles. A single machine could have 1,320 spindles but was complex and needed three workers to operate it. The invention was a huge success, and by the s, they were steam-powered. A single factory might have 60 of the machines, and soon there were 50 million mule spindles spinning away in Lancashire.
Crompton's Spinning Mule
The next development was the power loom weaving machine, invented by Edmund Cartwright (-) in . Cartwright was a former clergyman, and he was inspired to create the water- and then steam-powered loom after visiting a factory in Derbyshire. The fully automated machine only needed a single worker to change the full spindles every seven minutes or so. Cartwright's machine doubled the speed of cloth production but was not all that efficient; subsequent inventors worked on this problem with success, but Cartwright's theoretical principles were sound, and he himself never stopped improving his invention. The power loom was first used effectively in factories owned by Richard Arkwright. Textile factories across the country soon equipped themselves with hundreds of power looms. The British government awarded Cartwright £10,000 in in thanks for the significant contribution the power loom made to British industry. In , Cartwright was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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Power Looms
As the methods of the spinners had to keep up with those of the weavers, so, too, those who supplied the raw cotton had to increase their production to meet the booming demand. Eli Whitney (-) from Massachusetts, USA, moved to a cotton plantation in Georgia where he created a way to efficiently separate the sticky seeds from cotton balls. Whitney's Cotton Gin ('gin' meaning 'machine') was invented in and was powered by horses or water wheels. It pulled raw cotton through a comb mesh where a combination of revolving metal teeth and hooks separated it and removed the troublesome seeds. A single cotton gin could process up to 25 kg (55 lbs) of cotton every day. Just like Crompton and Cartwright, Whitney's invention was a victim of its own success and was so widely copied that he made little money from it himself, despite registering it with the patent office. As cotton production rocketed, so more and more slaves were used on the cotton plantations to pick the cotton balls that fed the insatiable gins. Cotton was exported far and wide. In Britain in , cotton accounted for 2.3% of total imports; by , that figure had rocketed to 55%. British textile mills worked the raw material and exported it out again with such success that cotton textiles accounted for half of Britain's total exports in .
The arrival of machines put a lot of skilled textile workers out of a job, & many protested violently.
Now, all three branches of the textile industry ' raw material production, spinning, and weaving ' could be fully mechanised, but still, the search for efficiency and great profits spurred on the inventors. Textile manufacturing was now big business despite the high costs to set up a machine factory, around £15,000 in (over $2 million today). As Allen notes, "Cotton was the wonder industry of the Industrial Revolution" (182).
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The first cast-iron loom powered by steam was invented by Richard Roberts (-) in . Using iron instead of wood (as in Cartwright's loom) meant that the machine did not warp, and so the tension of the yarns was kept constant. There were now much fewer instances of yarns snapping or becoming so loose they got tangled in the machinery. This meant that the production of woven cloth was faster than ever.
Diagram of a Roberts Loom
The inventors kept on improving the machines, both in Britain and in other countries. From the s, the British government prohibited the export of machinery to safeguard its competitive advantage, but, nevertheless, machines were smuggled out and used to set up mills in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The machines were more efficient than ever, and this meant that, despite the capital outlay required to acquire them, they became profitable even in places with much lower labour costs than in Britain.
A notable addition to a textile factory's repertoire was the calico (cheap cotton material) printing machine of c. , which permitted patterned textiles to be made using pre-punched cards. The Frenchman Joseph-Marie Jacquard (-) developed a machine that could create patterned silk fabric around , also using pre-cut cards. The Jacquard loom was adopted almost everywhere textiles were made.
Richard Roberts continued to work on mechanised looms, and he came up with something new in . Roberts' creative spirit was perhaps driven by self-interest since, once again, weaving had leapt forward thanks to his loom and spinning could not keep up and supply the yarns the weavers needed. This limited sales of the Roberts Loom. Roberts created a spinning machine that could run with very little input from humans, meaning they could run around the clock. The machine used gears, cranks, and a guide mechanism to ensure that yarn was always placed exactly where it should be and that spindles turned at varying speeds depending on how full they were (hence the machine's 'self-acting' name). Roberts' loom and mule combined provided mill owners with exactly what they had wanted: a factory floor with as few humans in it as possible.
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By , around 75% of cotton mills were using steam power, and there were well over 50,000 power looms being used in Britain. A steam-powered factory did not need to be located near a water source, so better sites could be chosen close to natural resources like coal. With ever more versatile, cheaper, efficient, and reliable machines, the textile industry had become almost completely automated, certainly to the extent that machine operators no longer needed any textile skills. Skilled workers lost their jobs to semi-skilled labourers, but there were more of the latter than the former thanks to the growth in the textile industry.
Howe's Sewing Machine
The British mechanized textile industry could now better its main rival India in production, and so exports boomed. Labour in India was cheap, but the British machines were faster, producing in 2,000 hours what an Indian 'factory' needed 50,000 hours to achieve. In short, the British "cotton mill of was so efficient that it could out-compete hand spinning anywhere in the world" (Allen, 187).
Elias Howe (-) invented a new type of sewing machine in Cambridge in the United States in (patented in ). It was the first machine to use the lockstitch (where there are two threads put in the cloth, one from below and one from above). The lockstitch made textiles much stronger since even if the thread broke the whole line of stitches did not unravel. The machine was far quicker than a person sewing by hand ' 640 stitches per minute compared to the average of 23 by hand. Consequently, "a calico dress took around six and a half hours to make by hand but just under an hour by machine. The clothing industry was completely revolutionised" (Forty, 149). There were soon imitation companies, notably that owned by Isaac Merritt Singer, who was obliged to pay royalties to Howe and give him a share in I. M. Singer and Co., a company which went on to become one of the leading sewing machine manufacturers, selling some half a million machines each year by . Howe kept on developing his idea, making smaller machines and adding a power source from a foot pedal, which meant that the textile industry went full circle, and once again, people had the opportunity to produce clothes and other textiles in their own homes.
Machines meant textile products were cheaper to buy for everyone, and supply industries like the cotton plantations and coal mines boomed. The increase in the number of factories meant many new jobs were created, albeit largely unskilled work. The populations of cities and towns like Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, and Halifax increased ten times over in the 19th century as people in the countryside flocked to cramped and unsanitary urban centres to find work.
Luddites Smashing Textile Machines
The arrival of machines put a lot of skilled textile workers out of a job, and many protested violently against the loss of their livelihood or the reduction in their wages. In the great manufacturing cities of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Nottinghamshire between and , a new protest group emerged, the Luddites, named after their mythical leader Ned Ludd, aka King Ludd. The Luddites broke into factories and smashed the machines that had taken away their jobs. The Establishment fought back. Handsome cash rewards were offered for information on or for the capture of Luddites, and the army was called in to protect factories and their owners. Those protestors who were caught faced harsh penalties that included hanging or deportation to Australia.
Workers in textile mills had to put up with difficult conditions. Not only were the machines noisy and sometimes dangerous when they failed (falling heavy parts and shuttles flying out like missiles with alarming regularity), but in order to keep the cotton thread supple and strong, the atmosphere in a factory was deliberately kept warm and damp. Such conditions meant that many workers suffered health problems, particularly with their lungs.
A working day in a factory was long, typically 12 hours and included night work as factories and their machines worked around the clock. Many employers preferred women and children to men as they were cheaper. Children were employed, too, because they could crawl under the machines to clear up cotton waste and prevent hanging threads clogging the machinery, all too often a lethal task. As money and efficiency became the obsession of many mill owners, workers were increasingly pressured to work faster and not cause delays in production. There were fines for workers with dirty hands or those who took too long on a toilet break.
All of these negatives meant that workers eventually grouped together to protect their interests. Trade unions were formed to try and curb the greater abuses from unscrupulous employers. Unions collected funds to help those who were ill or injured and so unable to work or be paid. Owners did not like these limits on their profits, and the government banned trade unions between and , but the movement to protect workers could not be stopped indefinitely.
Several acts of Parliament were passed from to try, not always successfully, to limit employers' exploitation of their workforce and lay down minimum standards. New regulations included the minimum age children could work, the length of shifts, the prohibition of night work for women and children, the obligation for owners to build protective screens for the more dangerous machines, and the appointment of government inspectors. Textile factories offered valuable employment, but they remained noisy, dangerous, and unhealthy places to spend most of one's waking hours in. The poet William Blake's description of factories as "dark satanic mills" (Horn, 52), sadly, remained apt long after the Industrial Revolution had passed.
The textile industry has come a long way since its early days of manual labour and traditional handloom techniques. One of the key turning points in the history of textile manufacturing was the introduction of machines. The advent of machinery revolutionised the industry, propelling it into the modern era of mass production and efficiency. In this blog post, we will explore how machines significantly accelerated the pace of textile manufacturing, leading to increased productivity, lower costs and improved quality.
Before machines came into play, textile manufacturing relied heavily on manual labour. Skilled artisans, often working in small-scale cottage industries, would painstakingly weave fabrics using handlooms or engage in labour-intensive processes such as spinning and carding. As demand for textiles grew with the rise of industrialisation, it became clear that a more efficient method was needed.
The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries marked a turning point in textile manufacturing. One of the most significant advancements was the invention of mechanised textile machinery. Innovations such as the spinning jenny, water frame and power loom transformed the industry by automating various stages of the production process.
Developed by James Hargreaves in the s, the spinning jenny was a game-changer in the textile industry. It enabled a single operator to simultaneously spin multiple threads, increasing productivity by several folds. The spinning jenny was particularly useful for spinning cotton, which was in high demand due to the popularity of cotton fabrics.
Invented by Richard Arkwright in the late s, the water frame improved upon the spinning jenny by utilising water power. This invention facilitated the mass production of yarn and allowed for consistent thread quality. The water frame could be operated by unskilled labourers, further increasing efficiency and reducing costs.
The power loom, developed by Edmund Cartwright in , revolutionised the weaving process. It automated the repetitive and labour-intensive task of weaving, allowing for faster and more consistent fabric production. The power loom could produce a wider variety of fabrics and patterns, catering to the increasing demand from consumers.
The introduction of textile machinery also gave rise to the factory system. Large-scale textile mills emerged, housing multiple machines and employing a large workforce. Division of labour became prevalent, with workers specialising in specific tasks, thereby streamlining the production process. This system enabled manufacturers to achieve economies of scale and further enhance productivity.
The use of machines in textile manufacturing had several profound effects on the industry;
a. Increased Production Capacity: Machines dramatically increased production output, enabling manufacturers to meet the growing demands of an expanding market. The ability to produce textiles in larger quantities contributed to the availability and affordability of clothing and other textile products.
b. Reduced Labor Costs: With the advent of machinery, the need for skilled artisans diminished. Unskilled workers could be trained quickly to operate the machines, resulting in lower labour costs for manufacturers. This, in turn, made textiles more accessible to a wider range of consumers.
c. Improved Efficiency and Quality: Machines brought consistency and precision to the manufacturing process. The uniformity of machine-produced fabrics ensured higher quality standards, reducing variations and defects commonly associated with handcrafted textiles.
d. Technological Advancements: The innovations in textile machinery paved the way for further advancements in manufacturing technologies. Over time, machines evolved, becoming faster, more efficient and capable of handling a broader range of materials.
The introduction of machines into textile manufacturing had a transformative impact on the industry. Through inventions such as the spinning jenny, water frame and power loom, the pace of production increased exponentially, leading to greater output, lower costs and improved product quality. The era of machines revolutionised the textile industry, setting the stage for mass production and industrialisation that characterise modern manufacturing practices.
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