Industry in Great Britain

Britain Was Ripe for Industry • Great food supply

• Excellent internal and global transportation networks

• Large workforce

• Plenty of people with money to invest

• These advantages are going to come to fruition with a great burst of inventiveness in the textile industry

Pre-Industrial Textiles • Britain has always raised a lot of sheep and

used wool for cloth and trade• Spinners and weavers made wool cloth by

hand using spinning wheels and looms • Britain also produced linen and cotton cloth • Spinners and weavers could not keep up with

the demand for cloth so the prices remained very high

• Cloth merchants wanted to find a way to speed up the production of cloth

Textile Innovations • By 1800 six major inventions had

transformed the cotton industry

• John Kay invented the flying shuttle in 1733

–The shuttle moved back and forth on wheels and allowed weavers to work twice as fast

–The problem was that the spinners couldn’t keep up so investors offered a price for a new spinning machine

• In 1764 James Hargreaves invented a new spinning wheel called the Spinning Jenny

–This allowed one worker to spin six or eight threads at a time (later increased to 80 threads at once)

• In 1769 Richard Arkwright invented the water frame which used water power from fast-flowing streams to drive spinning wheels

• Samuel Crompton combined the spinning jenny and the water frame into the spinning mule in 1779

–This made stronger, finer, and move even thread than earlier machines and it did it faster

• The water frame and the spinning mule were too large for people to have in their homes thus wealthy textile merchants set up the machines in large buildings called factories built near streams or waterfalls

• In 1785 Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom, run by water power

• By the late 1700’s, the spinners and weavers were working so quickly that cotton growers couldn’t keep up –Most of England’s cotton came from

the plantations in the southern United States

–The problem with cotton production involved removing the seeds from the raw cotton

• In 1793 Eli Whitney invented a machine to remove cotton seeds: the cotton gin

–This made it possible for slaves to pick and clean ten times more cotton daily than they had before and revitalized slavery in the United States

–This helped meet the textile industry’s demand for cotton

• As prices decreased (thanks to the efficiency of production), people began to demand more and more from the textile industry

• The output of cotton cloth experienced a 5000 percent increase from 1785-185 (from 40 million yards to 2 billion yards every year) and the demand for raw cotton stayed high

The Flying Shuttle

The Spinning Jenny

Spinning Mule

Water Frame

Power Loom

Cotton Gin

The Problem • The early power looms and spinning

machines were powered by water meaning that every factory that used them had to be near rushing water

–These places were often far from the raw materials, workers, and markets

–Factory owners found a new source of power in steam

The Newcomen Engine • As early as 1705 coal miners were using

steam powered pumps to remove water from deep mine shafts

–The problem was that this early steam engine,t he Newcomen Engine, was very slow and took great quantities of fuel making it expensive to run

The Watt Engine • In 1763 James Watt decided to tackle this

problem and entered a partnership with Matthew Boulton – Both men were entrepreneurs… people who

organized, managed, and took on the risks of a business

• With Boulton’s financial backing, Watt continued to make better and faster engines

• By 1800 nearly 500 steam engines were powering British factories and for the first time in history people had a source of power that could be used anywhere, anytime