Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  In 1741 the pair opened the world’s first mechanical spinning mill in Birmingham. Their machinery was powered by two donkeys and lasted only two years but they had no problem raising money to set up a water-powered mill in Northampton in 1743. This had five spinning frames, each of fifty spindles and each making an impressive six pounds of fifteen-grade cotton thread a day. However, the coarseness of the thread betrays the enduring problem of the roller system: stretching the yarn between two sets of rollers will increase its length, but it will not stretch the yarn evenly. In fact, once a yarn has begun to stretch the thinner points will become thinner still, while the thick parts stay thick – the more stretch, the more unevenness. Therefore Paul and Wyatt could achieve only coarse threads. In the traditional spinning cycle this problem of compounding existing unevenness in the thread is overcome by drawing and twisting the thread at the same time.

  There is frustratingly little information about Paul and Wyatt’s Northamptonshire venture. The mill was sold with all the machinery intact in 1764, but it appears that no one else copied their example or used their technology by paying them for a licence. As well as the coarseness of the thread, the partners’ machinery was not robust enough and needed constant repair. Interestingly, in view of Arkwright’s later success, another possible reason for the failure of their venture was the inability to manage the workers, with many failing to turn up for work. Matthew Boulton, who saw the Birmingham mill when he was a boy of thirteen, later described it to James Watt as ‘a good Cotton spinning Mill . . . that would have got money had it been in good hands’.3

  Instead the idea of using rollers was to be taken up in the 1760s by Richard Arkwright, although his water-frame (so-called because it was driven by water power) was probably conceived independently of Paul and Wyatt’s work.

  We will come to Arkwright later, but before his frame appeared, the real breakthrough into mechanisation came by abandoning the flyer and going back to the first principles of the ‘twist and draw’ spinning cycle. James Hargreaves was born into the Lancashire textile trade in 1720. By the time he was a young weaver, the flying shuttle was making the local demand for extra cotton yarn more urgent. His work on a mechanical device for spinning went on for some years and he probably built a working example of the spinning jenny in the late 1750s; by the mid-1760s friends and relatives were using the jenny in the Blackburn area. Hostility among hand-spinners, culminating in riots and machine-breaking, led to him leaving the area for Nottingham in 1768 where he set up a workshop-cum-mill. He belatedly took out a patent for his device in 1770.

  Spinning jenny: The rovings are fed on to the spindle via a gripping device known as the clove. The jenny achieves the drawing effect by pulling the clove away from the spindle to give tension, and imparts twist by slipping the thread over the end of the spindle (which is turned via the fly). The threads are pushed down on to the spindle once in every cycle.

  The jenny effectively copies the spinning method of the old distaff and spindle and the original spinning wheels. A row of turning spindles are placed at an angle and thread is twisted by continually slipping it over the ends of the spindles. At the same time the roving is drawn out by a small gripper, known as a clove, which moves steadily away from the spindle. Once the thread is drawn and twisted the jenny then reverses the spin to unwind the thread around the top end of the spindle (a process known as backing-off). In the final part of the cycle a wire, known as the faller, comes down on to the thread, as the spindle goes into forward motion and the clove comes back towards the spindle. All this allows the twisted and drawn thread to be reeled on to the lower part of the spindle – known as laying-on. The cycle is then repeated.

  The key facet of the jenny, and its advantage over the rollers employed by Paul and Wyatt, is that careful adjustment of the spinning speed of the spindles relative to the rate of drawing back of the clove, gives a remarkably even thread. While rollers, as we have seen, tend to exaggerate the variations in thickness already extant in the roving, the jenny can even them out, giving a fine thread from an uneven roving. This had previously been achieved by the spinner’s fingers; it was an extraordinary achievement for Hargreaves to replicate this intricate process with a machine. Legend has it that Hargreaves saw his daughter’s spinning wheel tipped over on its side, which gave him the idea of a horizontal great wheel – but this was the least of the innovations of the jenny, which was a complex and sophisticated answer to the problem of automated spinning.

  The early jenny ran eight spindles off one great wheel, using just one operator, but the number of spindles on one machine was, in theory, limitless. In 1783 the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce reported: ‘The construction of this kind of machine, called a Spinning jenny, has since been much improved, and is now at so high a degree of perfection, that one woman is thereby enabled with ease to spin a hundred threads of cotton at a time.’4 At a stroke the device had unblocked the logjam caused by the inability of spinners to keep pace with the flying shuttle, thereby paving the way for the exponential expansion of the textile industry. Nevertheless, while the jenny laid the foundation for a revolution in the textile industry, it still could not produce the very fine threads made by hand-spinners. Thread from the jenny was therefore used mainly for warp, while handspun thread continued to be used for the weft.

  While James Hargreaves had gone back to the old spinning cycle in the search for mechanisation, Richard Arkwright followed on from Paul and Wyatt by using rollers and a flyer. He patented his spinning frame in 1769. The origins of Arkwright’s invention are mired in myth and controversy (see here); but however he came by the original idea, it was Arkwright who turned a mechanical principle into a consistently productive industrial machine.

  Arkwright frame: The yarn passes through a number of pairs of rollers before being fed on to a flyer which spins around a spindle or bobbin. The tension in the thread is carefully controlled by turning the pairs of rollers at different speeds, controlled via weights and pulleys.

  Arkwright’s frame sent the cotton roving through a series of rollers and around weighted pulleys that gradually drew out the yarn; this seems to have been the crucial difference from Paul and Wyatt’s earlier device. Through months of adjustment and experimentation in his new mill at Cromford, Arkwright was eventually able to produce even thread from uneven rovings and then to twist it by using the U-shaped flyer. He wrote to his partner Jedediah Strutt in 1772: ‘Yours yesterday cam to hand together with a bill from Mr Need value 60 lb. I have sent a little cotton spun on the one spindle & find no difficulty in getting it from the Bobbin and dubled and twistd in the maner you see it at one opration. One hand I think will do 40 or 50 lb of it in one day from the bobins it is spun upon, that is in the new whay.’5

  As the moving parts in the machine required water power, Arkwright conceived the machine and the factory system together – his spinning frame was revolutionary because of its application and its setting. He also developed the mechanisation of carding – his carding engine, though not the first, was granted a patent in 1775 – and the preparation of rovings, allowing a continuous flow of work through his factories. Arkwright’s machine therefore brought about the mechanisation of the spinning industry, and mills with his frames were built all over Lancashire, Derbyshire and in Scotland.

  The final breakthrough in the mechanisation of spinning was to have the longest and deepest legacy. Samuel Crompton was born in 1753 and when his father died in 1758 the family, like many others in Lancashire, supported themselves through cotton spinning. From early childhood Crompton used a spinning wheel, but then changed to the spinning jenny when the device became available in the late 1760s. Crompton was fortunate enough to live in an old manor house called Hall’i’th’Wood near Bolton (his family had been wealthy but fallen on hard times), where he was able to use the empty rooms to experiment with making a machine that would improve on the jenny and produce the strong fine thread that the growing industry needed. Cromp
ton was a skilled musician, mathematician and craftsman who had gained an education at night school; he felt confident he could solve the problem. It took him seven years to perfect the machine, during which time he is said to have supported himself by spinning, weaving and by playing the violin at the Bolton theatre. Crompton later wrote about his invention: ‘About the year 1772 I Began to Endeavour to find out if possible a better Method of making Cotton Yarn than was then in Generall Use, being Grieved at the bad yarn I had to Weave. But, to be short, it took me Six years, that is until 1778, before I could make up my mind what plan to Adopt that would be equal to the task I hoped it would perform. It took from 1778 to 1779 to finish it.’6

  Crompton’s Mule, so named because of its combination of the jenny and the frame, was completed in the year in which riots broke out in Lancashire over the introduction of mechanised spinning based on the jenny and Arkwright’s frame. Crompton therefore initially kept his invention secret, using it to produce his own cotton thread, but news soon leaked out, attracting both interest and opposition. Crompton did not patent the device, partly because of the hostility, but also for fear of breaching Arkwright’s patent. But others took up the invention and it soon overtook the jenny and the frame as the main device for mechanised spinning. It retained that position until well into the twentieth century.

  So, how does it work? The mule is a complex and ingenious device that uses a series of drafting rollers to draw out and flatten the roving, which is then twisted by a spindle while being drawn out further, before being reeled on to the same spindle. Unlike the jenny, the second stage of drawing is done by mounting the spindle on a wheeled carriage, which moves away from and back towards the drawing rollers during each cycle. Others too had thought of combining the drawing rollers of Paul and Arkwright with the spinning cycle of the jenny but here, once again, the basic idea was only a small step; to build a working machine required endless determination and an ability to isolate and solve particular problems. While the process of effectively drawing out the thread twice gave the potential for fineness and strength that Crompton was looking for, the chief difficulty was precisely to coordinate the back and forth movement of the rapidly turning spindles with the finely regulated turning of the pairs of rollers. In the earliest models the operator helped fine-tune this process by holding up the movement of the carriage with one knee to increase tension, or by using a spare hand to push it faster in order to reduce tension – a process that was later made automatic. Crompton’s mule was therefore able to spin the finest threads, while preserving their strength. When he had finally got the result he needed, Crompton knew what it had cost him: ‘I . . . at length succeeded to my utmost desire, at the expense of every shilling I had in the world.’7

  Crompton, like most other inventors, was hoping to reap rich rewards from his device, but he was to be disappointed. His fear of having his machines destroyed and of breaching Arkwright’s patent meant that his invention was open to copying by any mill-owner with the means to build an imitation, and the strength to resist any protests. The fact that many did can be gauged from a survey conducted by Crompton himself when he sought recompense for his efforts. In 1811 he visited about 650 cotton mills in the area around Bolton to gather evidence for a petition to Parliament. He estimated that of the spindles in use, 155,880 were on a Hargreaves jenny, 310,516 on an Arkwright water-frame, and 4,600,000 were on his mule. This shows not only the dominance of his invention but also the vast expansion of the industry. By that time around 80 per cent of the cotton goods made in Lancashire were woven from cotton originally spun on mules and around 700,000 people were directly or indirectly dependent on Crompton’s invention for their livelihood. In support of the inventor’s petition James Watt testified that two-thirds of the Boulton & Watt engines installed in spinning mills were used for running mules. Parliament awarded Crompton £5,000, although he had been hoping for ten times as much. The bleach works he set up with the money failed and he died in 1827 with just £25 to his name. Only after his death did his home town of Bolton see fit to honour him.

  Over the next decades further innovations improved every part of the processing of cotton from its raw state to being wound on to spindles or bobbins ready for the loom, allowing most of the process to take place within a single powered mill. Carding machines for teasing out the raw cotton, washing, making rovings, winding on, spinning, packing and transportation were all improved so that the Lancashire industry could remain in front of its competitors. The Roberts Self-Acting Mule – which did away with the need for an operator to guide each cycle – was patented in 1825 and 1830, and in 1843 the ban on exports of textile machinery was lifted, giving a boost to sales of British mules and looms across the world. Technology speeded production and reduced costs to such a degree that there was a tenfold reduction in the price of fine (hundred-grade) cotton yarn between 1785 and 1795. Nowhere else in the world could compete with the Lancashire cotton industry.

  Like spinning, weaving threads into cloth is an ancient human skill. Early looms used either two rods pegged to the ground to hold the warp thread taut, or used weights to pull the warp down from a horizontal bar. The weft was then threaded through the warp by an in-and-out motion. An early development on this basic method came with the opening up of the gap known as the shed. A broad flat piece of wood, known as the shed stick, would be pushed through alternate warp threads, and could be turned to open up a gap for the weft shuttle to pass straight through. Once the shuttle pass, or pick, was made, a sword-stick would be used to beat the weft thread to bring it tightly against the woven section of the cloth. Crude though these looms were, the weavers were capable of producing cloth of astonishing fineness – up to 120-warp threads per centimetre.

  In the late part of the first millennium AD a more sophisticated method began to appear, in India and in the Arab world. Looms were built into frames with the warp running horizontally; alternate warp threads were threaded through holes in vertical rods known as heddles, and these heddles were hung from the top of the loom frame by strings. The shed could then be opened by pulling on one set of strings and then the other. Sometimes this pulling was done by a helper, usually a child, but a simple series of pulleys and pedals or stirrups enabled the weaver to pull the strings with their feet. This left the hands free to pass the shuttle through the shed. This type of loom spread with the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa and was widely adopted in medieval Europe; it was also at the heart of the extraordinary Bengal cotton industry, which was able to spin and weave the finest cotton using hand-spinning and hand-weaving and which, as we have seen, dominated the world cotton trade before the Industrial Revolution.8

  By the thirteenth century horizontal looms with foot treadles for opening the shed were well established in Britain. A typical English loom, used in urban workshops and rural cottages, was a large wooden structure – essentially a frame around two and a half metres long by two metres high, with the width dictated by the reaching through of the shuttle bearing the weft thread. The shed was opened by having each set of heddles attached to a horizontal bar above; rather than using alternate foot pedals, a simple counterbalance mechanism ensured that, as one bar was lifted, the other was lowered. The warp threads were kept separated and in parallel by the large comb-like ‘reeds’, originally made from wood and later from iron and then steel. Threading the warp on to the loom was obviously a time-consuming business, but weavers found ways to speed this up using specially made hand tools and techniques passed down through the trade. Different types of cloth could be produced by changing the relations between warp and weft: weaving the weft past sets of up to sixteen-warp threads at a time would give a satin weave, used mainly in silk, while changing the warp sets for each pass of the weft could give a diagonal effect to the weave, known as twill, which is common in denim cotton and in worsted wool.

  In late medieval England weaving moved out of urban workshops to cottages in the countryside. Here a family would be part of a farming c
ommunity with access to wool; the women and children would clean, comb and spin the wool, while the men wove the cloth and took it to the market. The development of ever finer wools led to the emergence of the so-called new draperies and, as we have seen, from the sixteenth century the supply of raw materials and the selling of cloth began to be taken over by clothiers and merchants operating a putting-out system. Where previously a farming family would have spun and woven their own wool, the new draperies called for thread made from worsted fibre, sometimes mixed with linen and cotton, which were obtainable only through clothiers and merchants who bought in bulk from shipping firms bringing cotton and flax from across the world.

  The ancient hand-craft of weaving was given a mighty jolt in the 1730s with John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle. Previously the weft thread was passed back and forth through the shed by hand; this limited the width of the loom and the speed of weaving. The flying-shuttle mechanism used a pair of leather straps as slings to throw the shuttle across the shed. The left and right straps were alternately ‘snapped’ into action by the weaver pulling a cord; the shuttle then flew across the shed before hitting the strap at the other end. The word ‘flying’ is deceptive – the shuttle actually ran along a wooden track that was positioned below the warp thread – but it certainly describes the apparent speed of travel. The ends of the wooden shuttle were tipped with brass and later steel to resist the continual bashing it got at each end of its run. Once the shuttle had passed, the weft was beaten into place and the shed reversed before the shuttle was sent back in the other direction. A further development of the flying shuttle followed in 1760 when Kay’s son Robert invented the drop box, which allowed any one of a set of shuttles, each loaded with a different coloured thread, to be brought into action by the weaver.