422 Chapter 22
were not the result of excellent technical schools; con-
tinental schools such as the Schemnitz Academy in
Hungary or the École des Ponts et Chaussées (the first
engineering school) in France were far superior. Most
British inventions were the inspiration of tinkerers and
artisans. One of the most important inventors of the
early industrial age, Richard Arkwright, was a semiliter-
ate barber with an exceptional mechanical aptitude.
The earliest beneficiary of the new technology was
the textile industry. Woolen goods had been a basic
British export for centuries; in the early eighteenth cen-
tury woolens accounted for 25 percent to 33 percent of
export revenue. Cotton goods were a newer export,
produced from raw cotton imported from Britain’s
American colonies. In 1700 textile manufacturing had
not changed much from medieval industry. Fibers were
spun into thread by hand, perhaps with a spinning
wheel, perhaps with simpler tools such as the distaff.
The threads were then woven into cloth on handlooms.
Spinning was usually done by women (hence the terms
spinsteror distaff side); weaving, by men. The entire hand-
craft process fitted comfortably into a rural cottage.
The new technology of the steam age soon threat-
ened cottage industry. Machines first changed the spin-
ning of thread: James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny
allowed one person to spin thread onto multiple spin-
dles, producing ten times as much thread—soon one
hundred times as much thread—as a good manual spin-
ner. Arkwright’s water frame mechanized the spinning
of threads to produce stronger thread with less labor.
The spinning mule of 1779 combined the spinning
jenny, the water frame, and the steam engine to pro-
duce forty-eight spindles of high-quality thread
simultaneously. Looms were also mechanized: The me-
chanical improvement of John Kay’s flying shuttle loom
allowed one person to do the work of two, and Ed-
mund Cartwright patented the first steam-powered
loom in 1785.
The consequence of this new technology was the
textile factory. There, the steam engine could be linked
to the spinning mule, to the power loom, or to banks of
dozens of each. All goods, from raw cotton to coal,
could be delivered to a single, convenient site, chosen
for inexpensive transportation costs such as proximity
to mines, location on a river, or nearness to a great har-
bor. Instead of having the looms of cottage industry
scattered around the countryside, they were now
grouped together in a single building or factory com-
plex, where an overseer could control the pace and
quality of work. Steam-powered textile machinery pro-
duced high-quality cloth in vast quantities.
The first steam loom factory opened at Manchester,
in northern England, in 1806. By 1813 there were 2,400
power looms operating in Britain, concentrated in Lan-
cashire, the Midlands, and Yorkshire. A decade later,
there were more than 10,000 textile factories using
power looms in Britain; at midcentury, 250,000. The re-
sultant change in the scale of textile manufacturing was
even greater than those numbers suggest. Whereas a
master weaver with thirty years of experience could pro-
duce two bolts of cotton cloth a week on a handloom, a
fifteen-year-old boy at a power loom could produce
seven bolts. Britain dominated global commerce in tex-
tiles, especially in the British Empire and Latin America,
and British merchants began to dream of the day they
could sell a shirt to everyone in China.Illustration 22.2
The Coalbrookdale Ironworks at
Night.Nothing better symbolized the
powerful changes of early industrializa-
tion than a large ironworks with its great
coke furnaces stoked. Such ironworks
were typically located on a country river,
where wood, coal, and water were plen-
tiful. This painting depicts the most im-
portant early ironworks, Abraham
Darby’s works in central
England.