by Bill Bryson
Hargreaves’s machine doesn’t look like much in illustrations—it was essentially just ten bobbins on a frame, with a wheel to make them rotate—but it transformed Britain’s industrial prospects. Less happily, it also hastened the introduction of child labor because children, nimbler and smaller than adults, were better able to make running repairs to broken threads and the like in the jenny’s more inaccessible extremities.
Before his invention, homeworkers spun five hundred thousand pounds of cotton in England every year by hand. By 1785, thanks to Hargreaves’s machine and the refined versions that followed, that figure had leaped to sixteen million pounds. Hargreaves, however, didn’t share in the prosperity that his machines created, in large part because of the machinations of Richard Arkwright, the least attractive, least inventive, but most successful of all the figures of the early Industrial Revolution.
Like Kay and Hargreaves, Arkwright was a Lancashire man—where would the Industrial Revolution have been without Lancashire men?—born in Preston in 1732, which made him eleven years younger than Hargreaves and nearly thirty years younger than Kay. (It is as well to remember that the Industrial Revolution wasn’t a sudden explosive event, but more a gradual unfolding of improvements over many lifetimes and in lots of different fields.) Before he became a man of industry, Arkwright was a publican, a wigmaker, and a barber-surgeon with a speciality in pulling teeth and bleeding those who were unwell. He seems to have gotten interested in cloth production through a friendship with another John Kay—this one a clockmaker who was no relation to the John Kay of the flying shuttle—and with his help began to pull together all the machinery and components necessary to bring the whole of mechanical cloth production under one roof. Arkwright was not a man troubled by a lot of scruples. He stole the rudiments of the spinning jenny from Hargreaves without hesitation or remorse (or of course compensation), wriggled out of business deals, and abandoned friends and partners whenever it became safe or profitable to do so.
He did have a genuine knack for making mechanical improvements, but his real genius was in turning possibilities into realities. He was an organizer—a hustler, really, but a very, very good one. Through a combination of hard work, luck, opportunism, and icy ruthlessness, he built up, for a short but extremely lucrative time, a virtual monopoly on the cotton business in England.
The people displaced by Arkwright’s machinery weren’t merely inconvenienced; they were often reduced to the basest desperation. Arkwright evidently saw this coming because he built his first factory like a fortress in a remote corner of Derbyshire—already a remote county—and fortified it with cannons and even a supply of five hundred spears. He cornered the market in the mechanical production of cloth, and in consequence grew fabulously rich, if not loved or especially happy. At his death in 1792, he employed five thousand workers and was worth £500,000—a fabulous sum for any man, but particularly for someone who had spent much of his life as a wigmaker and barber-surgeon.
In fact, the Industrial Revolution hadn’t become truly industrial yet. The man who made it so was the most unexpectedly pivotal figure of his, or almost any other, age: the Reverend Edmund Cartwright (1743–1823). Cartwright came from a well-heeled and locally important Nottinghamshire family and had aspirations to be a poet, but went into the church and was appointed to a rectorship in Leicestershire. A chance conversation with a cloth manufacturer led him to design—absolutely from out of nowhere—the power loom in 1785. Cartwright’s looms transformed the world economy and made Britain truly rich. By the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, a quarter of a million power looms were in operation in England, and the number grew by an average of 100,000 per decade before peaking at 805,000 in 1913, by which time nearly 3 million were working throughout the world.
Had Cartwright been compensated to anything like the degree his inventions merited, he would have been the richest man of his age—as rich as John D. Rockefeller or Bill Gates in theirs—but in fact he earned nothing directly from his invention at all and actually became indebted through trying to protect and enforce his patents. In 1809, Parliament awarded him a lump payment of £10,000, almost nothing compared with Arkwright’s £500,000, but enough to let him live out his final days in comfort. Meanwhile, he had developed an appetite for invention, and came up with rope-making and wool-combing machines (both very successful) as well as novel types of printing presses, steam engines, roof tiles, and bricks. His last invention, patented shortly before his death in 1823, was for a hand-cranked carriage “to go without horses,” which his patent application confidently declared would allow two men, cranking steadily but without undue exertion, to cover up to twenty-seven miles of ground in a day over even the steepest terrain.
With power looms humming, the cotton industry was ready to take off, but the mills needed far more cotton than existing sources could supply. The obvious place to grow it was the American south. The climate, too hot and dry for many crops, was perfect for cotton. Unfortunately, the only variety that would grow well in most southern soils was a difficult type known as short staple cotton. This was impossible to harvest profitably because each boll was packed with sticky seeds—three pounds of them for every pound of cotton fiber—and these had to be hand-plucked one by one. Separating seeds from fiber was such a labor-intensive operation that even with slave labor it could not be done economically. The costs of feeding and clothing the slaves were far greater than the amount of usable cotton that even the most diligent hand-plucking could produce.
The man who solved the problem grew up a long way from any plantations. His name was Eli Whitney, he came from Westborough, Massachusetts, and, if all the elements of the story are true (which, as we are about to see, they may not be), it was the luckiest of chances that allowed him to make his name immortal.
The story as conventionally told is this: After graduating from Yale in 1793, Whitney accepted a job as a tutor to a family in South Carolina, but upon arriving discovered that the promised salary was to be halved. Offended, he refused the position, which satisfied honor but left him fundless and a long way from home.
While sailing south he had met a vivacious young widow named Catharine Greene, wife of the late General Nathanael Greene, a hero of the American Revolution. A grateful nation had awarded Greene a plantation in Georgia for his support of George Washington through the darkest hours of the war. Unfortunately, Greene, a New Englander, was unused to Georgian heat, and on his first summer there fatally keeled over from sunstroke. It was to Greene’s widow that Whitney turned now.
Mrs. Greene was by this time cohabiting enthusiastically and fairly openly with another Yale man named Phineas Miller, her plantation manager, and they welcomed Whitney into their household. There Whitney was introduced to the cotton seed problem. Examining a boll, he at once thought he could see a solution. He retired to the plantation workshop and devised a simple rotating drum that used nails to snag cotton fiber as it turned, leaving the seeds behind. His new device was so efficient that it could do the work of fifty slaves. Whitney patented his gin (a shortened form of engine) and prepared to become stupendously wealthy.
That is the story as conventionally told. It appears, however, that a good deal of it may not actually be quite true. The suggestion now is that Whitney already knew Miller—their Yale connection does seem improbably coincidental otherwise—that he was acquainted with the problems of growing cotton on American soil, and that he traveled south, probably at Miller’s behest, knowing that he would try to invent a gin. Moreover, it appears that the work may not have been done in a couple of hours on the plantation, but over weeks or months in a workshop back in Westborough.
Whatever the actuality of its invention, the gin truly was a marvel. Whitney and Miller formed a partnership with every expectation of getting rich, but they were disastrous businessmen. For the use of their machine, they demanded a one-third share of any harvest—a proportion that plantation owners and southern legislators alike saw as frankly rapacious. That Whitney and
Miller were both Yankees didn’t help sentiment either. They stubbornly refused to modify their demands, convinced that southern growers could not hold out in the face of such a transforming piece of technology. They were right about the irresistibility, but they failed to note that the gin was also easily pirated. Any halfway decent carpenter could knock one out in a couple of hours. Soon plantation owners across the South were harvesting cotton with homemade gins. Whitney and Miller filed sixty suits in Georgia alone and many others elsewhere, but found little sympathy in southern courts. By 1800—just seven years after the gin’s invention—Miller and Catharine Greene were in such desperate straits that they had to sell the plantation.
The South, however, was growing very rich. Cotton was soon the most traded commodity in the world, and two-thirds of all that cotton came from there. American cotton exports went from almost nothing before the invention of the cotton gin to a staggering two billion pounds by the outbreak of the Civil War. At its peak, Britain took 84 percent of it all.
Before cotton, slavery had been in decline in the United States, but now there was a great need for labor because picking cotton remained extremely labor-intensive. At the time of Whitney’s invention slavery existed in just six states; by the outbreak of the Civil War it was legal in fifteen. Worse, the northern slave states like Virginia and Maryland, where cotton couldn’t be successfully grown, turned to exporting slaves to their southern neighbors, thus breaking up families and intensifying the suffering for tens of thousands. Between 1793 and the outbreak of the Civil War, over eight hundred thousand slaves were shipped south.
At the same time, the booming cotton mills of England needed huge numbers of workers—more than population increase alone could easily provide—so increasingly they turned to child labor. Children were malleable, worked cheap, and were generally quicker at darting about among machinery and dealing with snags, breakages, and the like. Even the most enlightened mill owners used children freely. They couldn’t afford not to.
So Whitney’s gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no other time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin. That is quite a lot of consequence for a simple rotating drum.
Eventually, some southern states did agree to pay Whitney a little. Altogether he made about $90,000 from the gin—just enough to cover his costs. Returning north, he settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and there hit on the idea that would finally make him rich. In 1798, he landed a contract to make ten thousand muskets for the federal government. The guns were to be manufactured by a new method, which came to be known as the Whitney system or American system. The idea was to build machines that would create an endless supply of matching parts, which could then be assembled into completed products. No worker would need any particular skills. The skills would all be in the machines. It was a brilliant concept. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin has called it the innovation that made America rich.
The guns were urgently needed because at the time America seemed on the brink of going to war with France. The contract was for $134,000—the largest government contract ever signed in America to that time—and was given to Whitney even though he had no machines and no experience of making guns. But in 1801, in a moment treasured by generations of history books, Whitney demonstrated to President John Adams and President-elect Thomas Jefferson how a tableful of random parts could be assembled into a complete gun. In fact, behind the scenes Whitney was having all kinds of problems getting the system to work. The guns were delivered more than eight years late, long after the crisis that had prompted their manufacture had abated. Moreover, a twentieth-century analysis of the surviving guns showed that they weren’t actually made by the Whitney system, but instead incorporated parts that had been hand-crafted in the factory. The famous demonstration for the presidents was done with bogus parts. Whitney, it turns out, spent most of the eight years not working on the musket order at all, but using the money from the contract to further his efforts to gain compensation for the cotton gin.
III
Compared with anything that had gone before, cotton was a wonderfully light and cool material, yet it did almost nothing to stifle the impulse to dress ridiculously, particularly where women were concerned. As the nineteenth century progressed, women became increasingly embedded in attire. By the 1840s, a woman might carry beneath her dress a knee-length chemise, a camisole, up to half a dozen petticoats, a corset, and drawers. The idea, as one historian has noted, was “to eliminate, as far as possible, any impression of shape.” All of this sartorial infrastructure could be dauntingly weighty. A woman could easily go about her daily business under forty pounds of clothing. How she managed to deal with urinary needs is a question that seems to have escaped historical inquiry. Crinolines, or hoopskirts, stiffened with whalebone or steel, were introduced as a way of giving shape without requiring so much underclothing, but while the load was fractionally lightened the scope for clumsiness was greatly increased. As Liza Picard put it in Victorian London: “One wonders how, or whether, Victorian ladies managed to traverse a properly equipped drawing room in a full crinoline without sweeping several small tables clear.” Getting into a carriage required consideration and cunning, as one fascinated correspondent indicated in a letter home: “Miss Clara turned round and round like a peacock, undecided which way to make the attempt. At last she chose a bold sideways dash, and entered with a squeeze of the petticoat, which suddenly expanded to its original size, but when her sisters had followed her there was no room for the Major” (or indeed anyone else).
Crinolines also lifted slightly when the wearer bent—when leaning to strike a croquet ball, for instance—offering an electrifying glimpse of frilly leggings to any man wise enough to say, “After you.” When strained, crinolines had a dismaying tendency to invert and fly upward, like a stressed umbrella. Stories abounded of women left trapped and staggering inside misbehaving hoops. Lady Eleanor Stanley recorded in her diary how the Duchess of Manchester tripped going over a stile—though why she decided to attempt to negotiate a stile in a hoopskirt is a separate imponderable—and ended up exposing her tartan knickerbockers “to the view of all the world in general and the Duc de Malakoff in particular.” High winds were a special source of disorder, and stairs a positive danger. The greatest risk of all, however, was fire. “Many wearers of crinolines were burnt to death by inadvertently approaching a fire,” C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington note in their unexpectedly solemn History of Underclothes. One manufacturer advertised proudly, if unnervingly, that its crinolines “do not cause accidents, do not appear at inquests.”
The golden age of crinolines was 1857–1866, by which point they were largely being abandoned, not because they were dangerous and preposterous, but because they were increasingly being worn by the lower orders, destroying their exclusivity. “Your lady’s maid must now have her crinoline,” tutted one magazine, “and it has even become essential to factory girls.” The danger of crinolines among the grinding cogs and whirring belts of factory machinery is easy enough to imagine.
The abandonment of crinolines didn’t mean that the age of pointless discomfort was at last coming to an end. Far from it, for crinolines gave way to corsets, and corsets became the most punishing form of apparel in centuries. A few authorities found this strangely heartening, on the apparent grounds that it somehow denoted sacrifice and chastity. The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, the Beetons’ popular periodical, approvingly recorded in 1866 how the boarders at one girls’ school were strapped into their corsets on a Monday morning and left constrained until Saturday, when they were allowed to ease the stays for an hour “for purposes of ablution.” Such a regime, the magazine noted, allowed the average girl to reduce her waist size from twenty-three inches to thirteen in
just two years.
The quest to reduce circumference at almost any cost to comfort was real enough, but the enduring belief that some women had ribs surgically removed to make their midsections even more compressible is, happily, a myth. Valerie Steele, in the engagingly precise and academic The Corset: A Cultural History, could find no evidence that even one such operation had ever been undertaken. For one thing, nineteenth-century surgical techniques were simply not up to it.
For medical experts tight corsets became something of an obsession in the second half of the nineteenth century. There wasn’t a functioning system within the body, it appeared, that wasn’t gravely susceptible to suffering and breakdown from the constricting effects of lace and whalebone. Corsets kept the heart from beating freely, which made the blood grow congested. Sluggish blood in turn led to almost a hundred recorded afflictions—incontinence, dyspepsia, liver failure, “congestive hypertrophy of the uterus,” and loss of mental faculties, to name a notable few. The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association, regularly investigated the dangers of tight corsets and concluded that in at least one case the victim’s heartbeats were so impeded that she died. Some doctors additionally believed that tightly laced undergarments gave women a greater susceptibility to tuberculosis.
Inevitably, a sexual dimension became attached to corset wearing. The tone of anticorset literature for women was strikingly similar to the tone of antimasturbation literature for men. By restricting blood flow and compressing organs in the vicinity of the reproductive zone, corsets, it was feared, could lead to a tragic increase in “amative desires” and possibly even induce involuntary “voluptuous spasms.” Gradually, clothing fears extended to every part of the body where clothes were worn snugly. Even tight-fitting shoes, it was suggested, could engender some dangerous tingling, if not a full-throttled, table-rattling spasm. In the worst cases, women could actually be unhinged by their clothing. Orson Fowler, author of an attack tantalizingly entitled Tight-Lacing, Founded on Physiology and Phrenology; or, the Evils Inflicted on the Mind and Body by Compressing the Organs of Animal Life, Thereby Retarding and Enfeebling the Vital Functions, propounded the theory that the unnatural distortion of circulation pushed extra blood to the woman’s brain and could thereby cause a permanent and disturbing change in personality.