Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  The flying shuttle increased the speed of weaving dramatically, and consequently the demand for spun yarn. Weavers were forced to spend their mornings trying to find spun wool, linen and cotton yarn for their looms. But once the spinning jenny, frame and mule started to spread from the 1770s, weavers had enough yarn to keep busy and the textile market boomed. But this was a short-lived boom for the cottage weaver. Mechanisation had increased the productivity of spinning by orders of magnitude; now inventors and manufacturers began to look for ways to mechanise weaving too.

  The man who first succeeded in the mechanisation of weaving was Edmund Cartwright. As he recalled:

  Happening to be at Matlock in the summer of 1784, I fell in company with some gentlemen of Manchester, when the conversation turned on Arkwright’s spinning machinery. One of the company observed, that as soon as Arkwright’s patent expired, so many mills would be erected, and so much cotton spun, that hands could never be found to weave it. To this observation I replied that Arkwright must then set his wits to work to invent a weaving mill. This brought on a conversation on the subject, in which the Manchester gentlemen unanimously agreed that the thing was impracticable; and, in defence of their opinion, they adduced arguments which I certainly was incompetent to answer, or even to comprehend, being totally ignorant of the subject, having never at that time seen a person weave.9

  Cartwright had an unusual background for an eighteenth-century inventor. Following the traditional route of a son of the English gentry he was educated at Wakefield Grammar School and University College, Oxford before becoming an Anglican rector and, in 1783, a canon at Lincoln Cathedral. Although he never saw a loom before 1784 he decided that he was capable of designing and building exactly the device that the expert Manchester gentlemen said was impossible. As with the mechanisation of spinning and the Newcomen and Watt engines, mechanising weaving depended on making a device capable of endlessly repeating a complex cycle of movements that normally required a highly skilled craftsman. To get through a cycle once without human intervention was only part of the achievement: sustaining the cycle reliably was the key. Cartwright realised that he needed to turn the rotary motion used by mills into a series of motions to open the shed, throw the shuttle, beat the weft, and progress the cloth forward, each minutely coordinated with each other. To do this he set about devising a system of cranks, eccentric wheels, cams and toothed cogs. His first power loom, patented in 1785, could operate a loom but failed to maintain the cycle, so Cartwright took out five more patents; his final patent for the power loom was granted in 1787. He then felt confident enough to build a factory in Doncaster to make his machines but this venture failed, probably for managerial rather than technical reasons. But, imperfect though his machines were, Cartwright had shown that an automated loom driven from a remote power source could be made. Now other more skilful engineers piled in with technical improvements. Cartwright’s loom needed the cycle to be stopped every so often for the warp thread to be sized and then dried with hot irons, but in 1803 William Radcliffe invented the dressing frame, which sized and dried the warp threads before they were wound on to the warp roller, thereby allowing the weaving to be continuous. Radcliffe also invented a ratchet that enabled the warp roller to feed the loom automatically.

  Power looms were designed and built to be used in factories where a single source of power, either a waterwheel or a steam engine, could drive a large number of individual looms. Once Watt had successfully adapted his steam engines to smooth rotary motion, weaving mills with a thousand looms could be built. The increase in productivity was stark, as one inventor noted:

  A very good Hand Weaver, a man twenty-five or thirty years of age, will weave two pieces of nine-eighths shirting per week, each twenty-four yards long . . . A Steam Loom Weaver, fifteen years of age, will in the same time weave seven similar pieces. A Steam Loom factory containing two hundred looms, with the assistance of one hundred persons under twenty years of age, and of twenty-five men will weave seven hundred pieces per week.10

  At the Great Exhibition of 1851 a cotton power loom was displayed that could weave 220 passes of weft per minute.

  People also looked for new ways to print and colour cloth, including weaving patterns into the cotton fabric. While this was important for the textile trade itself it also had far-reaching implications elsewhere. Plain cloth, particularly cotton, was traditionally printed using wood blocks. In 1752 Francis Nixon of Dublin began using engraved copper plates, which allowed exquisite detail to be printed on to cloth in repeat patterns; this was taken a stage further in 1783 when Thomas Bell patented the use of copper rollers for printing calico. Roller printing was eventually taken on by the traditional paper-printing industry. Vast quantities of plain cotton could now be rapidly printed into colourful cloths that became highly fashionable. The next challenge was to mechanise the weaving of coloured patterns.

  Starching: Weavers found that warp threads were easier to work if they were starched. This device heats the thread and applies starch mechanically.

  Knowledge of the Chinese draw-loom, along with the secrets of silk production and weaving of patterned cloth, travelled along the Silk Road in the late Middle Ages. By the fourteenth century weavers in Florence, Lucca and Siena were using draw-looms to produce exquisitely patterned silk and velvet. Louis XI brought Italian weavers to France in the fifteenth century, making Lyons the centre of European silk weaving. It was in France that the next significant innovation was made.

  In order to weave an intricate pattern into the cloth using a draw-loom, the weaver pulls up different sets of warp threads at each pick, or pass, of the weft thread. By doing this in a controlled sequence, a pattern emerges in the cloth. The draw-loom operator achieves this by pulling strings attached to the top ends of the healds, which are rods attached to the warp threads. For plain weaving the healds would be in two groups, and each would be raised alternately. In pattern weaving, there will be several different groups and they must be lifted at different points in the pattern cycle. In a complex pattern it could take around two weeks to prepare or ‘tie up’ the loom before weaving could begin.

  Draw-loom: One set of warp threads is drawn upwards using a series of strings (known as healds) attached to a draw bar. This opens the shed, through which the shuttle carrying the weft thread is passed. The weft is then beaten into place to give the cloth a tight finish. Only one of the alternate set of healds is shown here.

  In a draw-loom the lifting was done by a so-called drawboy, working under instruction from the weaver. The boy might be sitting on a beam above the loom pulling the strings upwards, or, as was more common in Europe, standing alongside the loom, pulling strings (known as ‘simples’ or ‘tail-cords’) downwards over a set of pulleys. The pulling of the simples in the correct sequence was obviously a highly complex task; making it work automatically was one of the great challenges of the age.

  The first step towards the automation of pattern weaving was taken by the French weaver Basile Bouchon in 1725, building on the principle of the draw-loom. Bouchon punched a series of holes in a roll of paper in a predetermined pattern. A line of needles was pushed against the paper by a gentle spring device; when a needle came opposite a hole it passed through, and this movement pulled a string which in turn pulled on a simple, thereby lifting that heald and the warp thread. When a needle did not meet a hole, the warp thread did not lift. At each pick the roll of paper would be moved on one line of holes and the process would begin again. In 1728 Jean-Baptiste Falcon replaced Bouchon’s paper with a series of stiff cards linked together on a roll, and in 1745 Jacques de Vaucason mounted Bouchon’s paper device on top of a loom. In all these cases the lifting of the healds was still done by a boy. There was strong resistance to the Vaucason loom in France and it seems not to have been developed further; this was a classic case of the right machine at the wrong time and place.

  Then in 1801 Joseph Marie Jacquard achieved the breakthrough into wholly automated pattern weaving. The fa
mous Jacquard loom was granted a patent in that year in France and in England in 1820; though industrial spies had brought it to Britain before then. The Jacquard device essentially took the cards made by Falcon and used them in the way designated by Bouchon and Vaucason, so a series of punched cards rolled over a square ‘roller’ presenting a different set of holes at each pick. The needles pushed against the cards and either lifted warp threads or left them flat. The device did away with the need for a drawboy and because it could specify individual warp threads with ease, it enabled smoother and more intricate patterns to be made. Even better, the cards themselves could be taken off the loom at the end of a run and stored away for future use.

  The dobby loom was an adaptation of the Jacquard loom, with a simpler and more robust mechanism using rods with pegs to trip the device that pulled the simples. Jacquard and dobby looms remained at the centre of the weaving industry into the twentieth century. Historians of science have long noted that the binary principle of the Jacquard was used in the punchcards of early computers, where a combination of simple on/off switches produced an operating system capable of complex tasks. The NAND gate, the basic component of the computer chip, is the modern equivalent: a simple binary device that, like the Jacquard loom, produces immensely complex results.

  A hand-weaver and a spinner: The Jacquard cards are arranged in a continuous loop above the bed of the loom.

  By the early nineteenth century, continual innovation over a period of four decades had made Britain the centre of world cotton production. The fiendishly difficult problems involved in mechanising spinning and weaving had been solved by a handful of British inventors. And these solutions had effects far beyond cotton production. They demonstrated that technical innovation could improve productivity to such a degree that jobs were gained rather than lost; and they gave a huge boost to the engineering, tool-making and machinery trades, and this in turn allowed other industries to become mechanised. The cotton trade was the crucible of the revolution that led Britain and then the world into an industrial future.

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  Too Much Too Soon: William Lee

  Knitting of stockings, like all hand knitting, is a skilled but slow process. Stockings were standard wear for most people from medieval times to the nineteenth century (when paved walkways made trousers feasible for men) and the craft was particularly strong in the Nottingham area. The hand-knitter works by holding a series of loops, which are at the top of the knitted web, on one needle, and then transferring them one by one to another needle; as each loop is transferred the knitter adds in another loop by pushing the needle into the existing loop, twisting it and pulling it up. This action pulls in more yarn, which the knitter holds, usually twisted around their finger, from where it feeds into the loops.

  As early as 1589 William Lee, a native of Calverton in Nottinghamshire, invented the stocking knitting frame. Essentially he used a series of looped needles, one for each stitch, to pull the new yarn down into the last line of the web, and then to push the yarn through holes in the web, from where it would be picked up by a separate device and pulled upwards to form the next line of the knitted web. The resulting long column of knitted material could have its sides stitched together to form the tube of a stocking. Lee’s first machines had just eight needles, and so created only a coarse fabric, but he soon adapted it to twenty needles.11

  The immediate fate of Lee’s invention helps explain why the Industrial Revolution did not happen in Elizabethan England. His application for a patent was refused. The grounds are unclear, but the novelty of the device would not have counted: he would have had to demonstrate the advantages it held for the knitting trade. And if London guilds could show that it would put people out of work, the patent application was a lost cause. But Lee pushed ahead anyway. An agreement with one George Brooke dated 6 June 1600 shows that his partner was to invest £500 in return for a share of the profits, but Brooke was arrested soon afterwards and, in 1603, executed for treason.

  Lee left the country and took his invention, and possibly some workers and machinery, to Rouen where he was granted a patent. There is much uncertainty as to the exact dates of Lee’s life and work in France but in 1610 or 1612 he set up a partnership providing machinery to make silk and wool stockings for a local manufacturer. The last written record of Lee in 1615, describes him as an English gentleman whose occupation is ‘knitter of stockings’.

  Some later accounts suggest that Lee’s brother James, who had gone with him to France, returned first to London and then to a village near Nottingham and reintroduced the frame. One reason for the subsequent slow spread of the frame was its cost – around £20 or £30 in the 1660s – so it was used for the high-priced end of the market while hand-knitters continued to make basic woollen goods. In 1664 there were around 400–500 frames in London, a hundred in Nottingham and fifty in Leicester. But over the next century lower rents and wages, as well as freedom from guild regulations, saw the industry move from London to the East Midlands.

  Looking back to the middle of the eighteenth century William Gardiner wrote: ‘The manufacture in Leicester chiefly consisted in making pink stockings for the lower orders; and, for the higher, pearl-coloured with scarlet clocks. In the dress of men the waistcoat flaps came down nearly as low as the knee; and the stockings made long enough to reach the top of the thigh, were gartered on the outside and the top rolled down as far as the leg . . . The chief [export] article was white and brown thread hose for Spain, Portugal and the West Indies.’12 Derby, the third city of the East Midlands, became the centre of silk-stocking production.

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  12. Richard Arkwright:The King of Cotton

  ‘The thirteenth child of a family steeped to the lips in poverty, [Arkwright] was turned into the world without education, which in after life he never found time to acquire. Trained to a servile handicraft, and without a shilling of capital, the position from which he raised his fortunes had not one of the advantages enjoyed by Crompton; but to compensate for this he possessed an indomitable energy of purpose which no obstacle could successfully oppose.’

  Gilbert J. French, The Life and Times of Samuel Crompton (1859)

  WAS THERE EVER a man more suited to the challenges of his time, more akin to the spirit of his age than Richard Arkwright? Arrogant, restless, dedicated, generous, convinced of his own genius and unimpressed by his social betters, Arkwright was a giant among giants; a northerner of humble origins who rose to become the world’s first industrial magnate. His achievements speak for themselves: he transformed the cotton industry from a craft trade into an international powerhouse; he invented the factory system and made it pay; he was the focus of the most famous patent trials in history; acquired an immense fortune; and attracted ridicule, exasperation, admiration and adulation in equal measure. For some he embodied the greed, low-dealing, bullying and ambition that were the worst aspects of capitalist endeavour; for others he was a heroic pioneer, a rough-and-ready soul who dared to do what others would not, who put dukes in their place, treated his workers well and brought prosperity to everything he touched and to every region in which he invested. Other industrial entrepreneurs – Boulton, Wedgwood, Stephenson – combined technical ingenuity with business acumen and personal vision, but Arkwright was the king of them all. He embodied the buccaneering spirit of industrialisation and its impatience to reshape the world.

  Richard Arkwright was born in 1732 in Preston in Lancashire, then a small prosperous town of around 5,000 inhabitants on the banks of the Ribble.1 His father Thomas was a tailor who apprenticed his son to a barber at nearby Kirkham. According to family recollections Richard showed signs of mechanical ingenuity as a youth, forever fixing and making small machines. In 1750, at the age of eighteen, he moved to Bolton to work for a peruke-maker called Edward Pollit – a peruke was a gentleman’s wig, and barber and wig-maker were alternative descriptions of the same trade. In 1755 Arkwright married Patience Holt, daughter of a schoolmaster with some property to his nam
e, but his wife died a year later. He married again in 1761 and the following year took on a public house in Bolton, the Black Boy, while continuing to travel around Lancashire to build up his wig-making and barbering business.

  It was around this time that Arkwright began seriously to pursue the making of a machine for spinning cotton thread. Through his travels and connections he was thoroughly immersed in the textile trade and he knew that demand for cotton was growing. He was also aware of the spread of the flying shuttle in the cotton districts: men of technical ingenuity all over Lancashire were looking for ways of spinning cotton more quickly to keep up with the growing demand from weavers.

  As we have seen, the idea of drawing out cotton rovings between pairs of rollers running at slightly different speeds had been developed by Lewis Paul and his partner John Wyatt, but their machinery had proved inadequate.2 The rollers did not do a good enough job in producing a fine even thread ready for twisting, the machinery was unreliable and the mills were poorly run. Arkwright knew the problems that rollers induced and was aware that others had lost money backing the idea. Nevertheless by 1767 he had embarked on solving the problem.