Curtains and other decorative textiles appeared in houses. By the middle of the century, families no longer had to spend time spinning and weaving. The factories provided a wide variety of textile products to everyone, everywhere. They were also an important source of new jobs.
People moved from farms and small towns to larger towns and cities to work in factories and the many support businesses that grew up around them. The success of the textile industry fostered many other factory systems. Craftsmen and artisans of all types were replaced as stores and mail-order catalogs marketed inexpensive manufactured goods to all.
By the end of the 19th century, textile mills and other factories produced an incredible range of new products, and generated vast new support industries, financial institutions, and transportation and information networks.
Water power efficiency improved and the increasing use of steam power increased. Machine tools were developed and the factory system was on the rise. Textiles were the main industry of the Industrial Revolution as far as employment, the value of output and capital invested. The textile industry was also the first to use modern production methods. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and most of the important technological innovations were British.
The Industrial Revolution was a major turning point in history; almost every aspect of daily life changed in some way. Average income and population began to grow exponentially. Some economists say that the major impact of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general population began to increase consistently for the first time in history, but others have said that it did not begin to really improve until the late 19th and 20th centuries.
At approximately the same time the Industrial Revolution was occurring, Britain was undergoing an agricultural revolution , which also helped to improve living standards and provided surplus labor available for industry. Several inventions in textile machinery occurred in a relatively short time period during the Industrial Revolution. Here is a timeline highlighting some of them:. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data.
Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. After , Britain abandoned mercantilism and committed its economy to free trade with few barriers or tariffs. This was most evident in the repeal in of the Corn Laws, which imposed stiff tariffs on imported grain.
The end of these laws opened the British market to unfettered competition, grain prices fell, and food became more plentiful. If political conditions in a particular overseas market were stable enough, Britain could dominate its economy through free trade alone without resorting to formal rule or mercantilism. Apart from coal and iron, most raw materials had to be imported so in the s, the main imports were in order : raw cotton from the American South , sugar from the West Indies , wool, silk, tea from China , timber from Canada , wine, flax, hides, and tallow.
By , its global share soared to The British textile industry triggered tremendous scientific innovation, resulting in such key inventions as the flying shuttle, spinning jenny, water frame, and spinning mule. These greatly improved productivity and drove further technological advancements that turned textiles into a fully mechanized industry.
Describe the technology that allowed the textile industry to move towards more automated processes. During the second half of the 17th century, the newly established factories of the East India Company in South Asia started to produce finished cotton goods in quantity for the UK market.
The imported calico and chintz garments competed with and acted as a substitute for indigenous wool and linen produce. That resulted in local weavers, spinners, dyers, shepherds, and farmers petitioning the Parliament to request a ban on the import and later the sale of woven cotton goods.
They eventually achieved their goal via the and Calico Acts. The acts banned the import and later the sale of finished pure cotton produce, but did not restrict the importation of raw cotton or the sale or production of fustian a cloth with flax warp and cotton weft. The exemption of raw cotton from the Calico Act saw 2, bales of cotton imported annually from Asia and the Americas and forming the basis of a new indigenous industry, initially producing fustian for the domestic market.
More importantly, though, it triggered the development of a series of mechanized spinning and weaving technologies to process the material.
This mechanized production was concentrated in new cotton mills, which slowly expanded. By the beginning of the s, 7, bales of cotton were imported annually.
The new mill owners put pressure on Parliament to remove the prohibition on the production and sale of pure cotton cloth as they could now compete with imported cotton. Since much of the imported cotton came from New England, ports on the west coast of Britain such as Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow were crucial to determining the sites of the cotton industry.
Lancashire became a center for the nascent cotton industry because the damp climate was better for spinning the yarn. As the cotton thread was not strong enough to use as warp, wool, linen, or fustian had to be used and Lancashire was an existing wool center.
The textile industry drove groundbreaking scientific innovations. These shuttles were housed at the side of the loom in what became known as the drop box. Lewis Paul patented the roller spinning frame and the flyer-and-bobbin system for drawing wool to a more even thickness.
The technology was developed with the help of John Wyatt of Birmingham. Paul and Wyatt opened a mill in Birmingham, which used their new rolling machine powered by a donkey. It operated until about A similar mill was built by Daniel Bourn in Leominster, but it burnt down. Both Paul and Bourn patented carding machines in Based on two sets of rollers that traveled at different speeds, these were later used in the first cotton spinning mill.
In in the village of Stanhill, Lancashire, James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which he patented in It was the first practical spinning frame with multiple spindles.
The jenny worked in a similar manner to the spinning wheel by first clamping down on the fibers then drawing them out, followed by twisting. The jenny produced a lightly twisted yarn only suitable for weft, not warp. Model of spinning jenny in the Museum of Early Industrialization, Wuppertal.
The device reduced the amount of work needed to produce yarn, with a worker able to work eight or more spools at once. This grew to as technology advanced. The spinning frame or water frame was developed by Richard Arkwright who along with two partners patented it in The design was partly based on a spinning machine built for Thomas High by clock maker John Kay, who was hired by Arkwright.
For each spindle, the water frame used a series of four pairs of rollers, each operating at a successively higher rotating speed to draw out the fiber, which was then twisted by the spindle.
The roller spacing was slightly longer than the fiber length. Closer spacing caused the fibers to break while further spacing caused uneven thread. The top rollers were leather-covered and loading on them was applied by a weight that kept the twist from backing up before the rollers. The bottom rollers were wood and metal, with fluting along the length. A horse powered the first factory to use the spinning frame.
Arkwright and his partners used water power at a factory in Cromford, Derbyshire in , giving the invention its name. Richard Arkwright is credited with a list of inventions, but these were actually developed by such people as Thomas Highs and John Kay. Arkwright nurtured the inventors, patented the ideas, financed the initiatives, and protected the machines. He created the cotton mill, which brought the production processes together in a factory, and he developed the use of power—first horse power and then water power—which made cotton manufacture a mechanized industry.
The spindles were placed on a carriage that went through an operational sequence during which the rollers stopped while the carriage moved away from the drawing roller to finish drawing out the fibers as the spindles started rotating. Mule spun thread was of suitable strength to be used as warp and finally allowed Britain to produce good-quality calico cloth.
The only surviving example of a spinning mule built by the inventor Samuel Crompton. The spinning mule spins textile fibers into yarn by an intermittent process. In the draw stroke, the roving is pulled through rollers and twisted. On the return it is wrapped onto the spindle.
Realizing that the expiration of the Arkwright patent would greatly increase the supply of spun cotton and lead to a shortage of weavers, Edmund Cartwright developed a vertical power loom which he patented in The textile industry was also to benefit from other developments of the period. As early as , Thomas Savery made a vacuum steam engine.
His design, which was unsafe, was improved by Thomas Newcomen in Watt continued to make improvements on his design, producing a separate condenser engine in and a rotating separate condensing engine in Watt formed a partnership with a businessman Matthew Boulton and together they manufactured steam engines that could be used by industry.
From this point there were no new inventions, but a continuous improvement in technology as the mill-owner strove to reduce cost and improve quality. Developments in the transport infrastructure such as the canals and, after , the railways, facilitated the import of raw materials and export of finished cloth.
The use of water power to drive mills was supplemented by steam-driven water pumps and then superseded completely by the steam engines. It was initially powered by a water wheel, but installed steam engines in In , the average power of a mill engine was 48 horsepower hp , but Quarry Bank mill installed an new hp water wheel. William Fairbairn addressed the problem of line-shafting and was responsible for improving the efficiency of the mill.
In , he replaced the wooden turning shafts that drove the machines to wrought iron shafting, which were a third of the weight and absorbed less power. The mill operated until In , using an patent, Richard Roberts manufactured the first loom with a cast-iron frame, the Roberts Loom.
Although it was self-acting, it had to be stopped to recharge empty shuttles. It was the mainstay of the Lancashire cotton industry for a century, when the Northrop Loom invented in with an automatic weft replenishment function gained ascendancy.
The Stalybridge mule spinners strike stimulated research into the problem of applying power to the winding stroke of the mule. In , Richard Roberts patented the first self-acting mule.
The draw while spinning had been assisted by power, but the push of the wind was done manually by the spinner. Before , the spinner would operate a partially powered mule with a maximum of spindles.
After , self-acting mules with up to 1, spindles could be built. The savings with this technology were considerable. A worker spinning cotton at a hand-powered spinning wheel in the 18th century would take more than 50, hours to spin pounds of cotton. By the s, the same quantity could be spun in hours by mule, and with a self-acting mule it could be spun by one worker in just hours.
While profiting from expertise arriving from overseas, Britain was very protective of home-grown technology. In particular, engineers with skills in constructing the textile mills and machinery were not permitted to emigrate — particularly to the fledgling America. In , he took his skills in designing and constructing factories to New England and was soon engaged in reproducing the textile mills that helped America with its own industrial revolution.
Local inventions followed. In , Eli Whitney invented and patented the cotton gin, which sped up the processing of raw cotton by over 50 times.
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