![]() In fact, the ratio of helper to helpee almost certainly ran quite in Kay’s favor, given his expertise with fine machinery as an experienced clockmaker.Ĭreating a spinning machine presented a serious challenge because it had to combine two motions – first a clump of short cotton fibers (called the roving) had to be drawn out into a longer piece, with just the right speed and force – too hard, and the fibers would simply pull apart, too gentle and they would remain clumped. With the help of another John Kay (no relation) he devised a new machine for spinning cotton fibers into thread. ![]() In 1767, he decided to invest his earnings in the cotton business. As a young Lancashire man, Arkwright plied the cephalic trades of barber and wig-maker, and made a tidy profit from his invention of a new water-proof wig dye. Richard Arkwright was the first to exploit the potential of cotton making on an industrial scale. By eliminating the need for an assistant on either side of the loom to pass the shuttle back and forth, this invention reduced the cost of making British broadcloth. For example, John Kay’s fly shuttle of 1733, which allowed a single artisan seated at a loom to sweep the bobbin holding the weft yarn from one side of the warp to the other with a quick flick of the wrist. Meanwhile, slowly, over the course of the eighteenth century, several entrepreneurs figured out new ways to improve the efficiency of the production steps required to turn raw fibers into cloth. And so, a domestic cotton cloth industry slowly developed, despite the combined cost of importing fibers by ship and then paying expensive British workers to turn it into cloth. They did not, however, forbid the import of raw cotton. This increasing popularity infuriated the domestic wool interests and silk weavers, leading to riotous attacks on calico-wearers and, eventually, the 17 Calico Acts, which banned first the import and then the sale of imported cotton cloth. It therefore became popular and fashionable as soon as imports began in the seventeenth century, especially among those who could not afford silks. Like linen (the only other readily available fabric except for luxurious silk), cotton was more comfortable against the skin than wool, and it could hold detailed patterns and luminous colors better than wool or linen. Instead, the bulk of cotton cloth in Britain came as a manufactured product from India, and often went by the name calico,after the Indian city of Calicut (now known as Kozhikode). ![]() Unlike sheep, cotton did not thrive in the British climate, nor did it usually make economic sense, given the cost of British labor, to import raw cotton and spin and weave it locally. Ĭotton, on the other hand, remained an exotic import. In the middle of the eighteenth century, roughly one in every ten Britons was still involved in the woolens industry – raising and shearing sheep spinning yarn and knitting, weaving, fulling, or dyeing cloth. Sheep thrived on the rolling green fields of England and Scotland, and wool cloth had been a major domestic and export industry since the Middle Ages. For centuries, Britain had been a country of woolmakers. The demand came from a new industry that spread across the British countryside, especially in the county of Lancashire around the industrial town of Manchester: the making of cotton cloth. To the extent that coal besmirched the skies and walls and British cities, it was a product of home heating, not “dark, Satanic Mills.” Three forces drove the transformation of the steam engine into an urban and industrial machine – the new levels of fuel efficiency achieved by Watt, an explosion in demand for power, and a new style of steam engine that produced a rotary motion. So too did the steam engines, which mainly worked to drain mines in the countryside. ![]() Industry thus remained dispersed in villages and rural areas, where easy access could be had to running water. To the extent that they drove industrial machinery, it was almost always indirectly, by lifting water uphill from whence it could run back down and turn a waterwheel. Up until the 1780s, steam engines were used almost exclusively for pumping water. ![]()
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