The Revolution In Making Cloth

Practical people seeing the need for greater output solved the practical
problems of production. In the many steps from the raw cotton to the finished
cloth, there were bottlenecksprimarily in making yarn and weaving the strands
together.

In 1733, John Kay (1704-1764), a spinner and mechanic, patented the first of
the great machines - the flying shuttle. This device made it possible for one
person to weave wide bolts of cloth by using a spring mechanism that sent the
shuttle across the loom.

This invention upset the balance between the weavers of cloth and the
spinners of yarn: ten spinners were required to produce enough yarn needed
by one weaver. James Hargreaves (d. 1778), a weaver and carpenter,
eliminated that problem in 1764 with his spinning jenny, a mechanical
spinning wheel that allowed the spinners to keep up with the weavers.

Five years later, a barber named Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) built the
water frame that made it possible to spin many threads into yarn at the same
time. Ten years after that Samuel Crompton (1753-1827), a spinner,
combined the spinning jenny and water frame into the water mule, which, with
some variations, is used today.

By this time the makers of yarn were outpacing the weavers, but in 1785
Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823) invented the power loom that mechanized
the weaving process. In two generations what had once been a home-based
craft became an industry.

The appetite of the new machines outran the supply of cotton. Since most of
the material came from the United States, the demand exceeded the
capability of the slave-based southern economy to fill the supply.

The best worker could not prepare more than five or six pounds of cotton a
day because of the problems of the seeds. American inventor Eli Whitney
(1765-1825), among others, devised the cotton gin, a machine that enabled a
worker to clean more than fifty times as much cotton a day. This device
coincidentally played a major role in the perpetuation of slavery in the United
States.

Finally, the textile industry became so large that it outgrew the possibilities of
its power source: water power. Steam came to drive the machines of
industrializing Britain. In the first part of the eighteenth century a mechanic,
Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729), made an "atmospheric engine" in which a
piston was raised by injected steam. As the steam condensed, the piston
returned to its original position.

Newcomen's unwieldy and inefficient device was put to use pumping water
out of mines. James Watt (1736-1819), a builder of scientific instruments at
the University of Glasgow, perfected Newcomen's invention. Watt's steam
engine also was first used to pump water out of mines.

It saved the large amounts of energy lost by the Newcomen engine and led to
an increase in coal productivity. After 1785 it was also used to make cloth and
drive ships and locomotives.

The application of steam to weaving made it possible to expand the use of

cloth-making machines to new areas, and after 1815 hand looms began to
disappear from commercial textile making, replaced by the undoubted
superiority of the cloth-making machines.

These inventors made their contributions in response to the need to solve a

particular problem. Their machines and the new power sources expanded
productivity and transformed society in ways never before dreamed of. The
transition from a rural agrarian to an urban lifestyle merits applying the term
revolutionary to the process of industrialization.

The steps in increasing textile production were repeated and continue to be

repeated in other goods as well. The liberation from the productive limitation
of human and animal power to satisfy essentially unlimited demand is the
great gift of industrialization.

[See Power Looms: Power looms in operation in an English mill in the 1820s.]

Britain's Dominance

Industrialization began in Britain in the eighteenth century for a number of

reasons. Neither the richest nor the most populous country in western Europe,
it did, nevertheless, possess at virtually all levels of society a hard-working,
inventive, risk-taking private sector that received strong support from the
government.

Industrialization could not begin and grow without individual business owners
who took a chance on something new.

The British kept this close tie between private initiative and creative
governmental support throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Thanks to early governmental support of road improvements and canal

construction, Britain had a better transportation network than any other
country in Europe. The British also had mastery of the seas, excellent ports,
and a large merchant fleet.

They enjoyed the advantage of living safely on their island, away from the
carnage of war, even during the Napoleonic wars.

The chance to industrialize in stable conditions gave them the opportunity to

profit from war contracts between 1792 and 1815. They developed their
industrial capacity without fear of battle damage or loss of life.
Probably the most important factor was the relative flexibility of the British
social and political systems. Members of the elite, unlike their colleagues on
the continent, pursued their wealth in the new industrial framework with great
energy.

They worked closely with the middle classes and workers, even to the point
during the nineteenth century of sponsoring gradual reform efforts to stifle any
chance of revolution from below.

The combination of inventiveness, growing markets, governmental support,

and social flexibility made Britain the world's dominant economic power until
the end of the nineteenth century.

Napoleon's interference had hurt economic growth, but had also spurred the
British to look for new manufacturing methods and markets.

Once the wars were over, Britain flooded the continent and the Americas with
high-quality, inexpensive goods. No nation could compete against British
efficiency.

When Britain began industrializing before 1789, there were isolated areas on
the continent such as the French Le Creusot works that could have served as
the base for a similar growth. Twenty-six years of revolution and mercantile
policies made that competition impossible. ^15

[Footnote 15: E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (New York:

New American Library, 1964), pp. 44-73.]

Cotton production continued to increase and was supplemented by the arrival

of the modern Iron Age. In 1800 Russia and Sweden had exported iron to
Britain. By 1815 Britain exported more than five times as much iron as it
imported.

By 1848 the British produced more iron than the rest of the world combined.
As in textile production, in ironmaking a number of inventions appeared to
respond to problems. Refining of the brittle cast iron was improved to make it
more malleable and tougher. At the same time more efficient mining
processes for both coal and iron ore were used to ensure a constant supply of
raw materials.

To further dominate the metals market, in the 1850s Henry Bessemer (1813-
1898) developed a process to make steel, a harder and more malleable
metal, quickly and cheaply.

So effective was the process that between 1856 and 1870 the price of British
steel fell to one half the amount formerly charged for the best grade of iron.
The drastic reduction in price, a mark of industrialization, had a positive
impact on all areas of the economy.
In the period after midcentury Britain produced more than two-thirds of the
world's coal and more than half of the world's iron and cloth. Industrial
development encouraged urbanization and by 1850 more than half of the
population lived in cities and worked in industries.

The British continued to enjoy the highest per capita income in the world, and
the island nation stood head and shoulders above the world in terms of
economic and material strength.