Textiles lectures part 1
- 2. Before the revolution • Before 1700 cloth was mainly made of wool. • The wool industry was one of the most important in England and wool merchants were often extremely rich. • Much of it took place in the countryside • First a wool merchant would buy the sheep fleeces from farmers.
- 3. • The merchant would take the fleece – the raw wool - to workers in cottages to start turning it into cloth. • The cloth was made in people’s own homes. It was often a family process. • It was called the Domestic system
- 4. • First the children and women would clean the dirty greasy fleece by washing with soap in a wooden tub • Then they would hang it from the beams in the cottage ceiling to dry
- 5. • Next the children or mother would card the wool – combing all the tangled wool fibres so they go in the same direction
- 6. • Then the mother or older girls would spin the wool by hand. Up until the 14th century spinning tended to be done on a spindle • The spun wool becomes yarn or thread
- 7. • Then the mother or older girls would spin the wool by hand. • The spinning wheel was a simple machine and most families would own one • Grandmothers and mothers would pass the skills down to the daughters
- 9. Then the man of the family would take the yarn the women had spun and weave it to make it into cloth
- 10. • It was a very skilful job but labour-intensive. It was quite slow and one person could only work on one piece of cloth at once.
- 11. • The weaving loom was a large and expensive item. So although some weavers owned their own looms, many rented one from the merchant or ‘clothier’ (a person who sells cloth).
- 12. Woven fabrics are made up of a warp - the yarn going down the length of the loom – and a weft - the yarn going across the width of the fabric . The side of the fabric is called the selvedge
- 13. The first stage in weaving the cloth is to put the long threads or weft onto the loom. Then the warp threads will be woven in and out of the weft.
- 14. The warp threads are lifted by the pedals and the shuttles of yarn go from side to side weaving in and out – you will see this hand loom at Quarry Bank
- 15. • At the end of this process the weaver will have made a roll of cloth. • The clothier paid the weaver according to how much the fabric weighed.
- 16. Finally the clothier had the cloth ‘finished’ by fulling or dyeing. Fulling was not a nice job!
- 17. • Dyeing was the final stage to make the cloth a different colour. Many of the dyes were made out of plants, tree bark or roots, or insects
- 18. The clothier then sold the finished cloth in his own shop or at a cloth market like this one in Leeds
- 19. Production cycle in the ‘domestic system’
- 20. All change! • The textile industry changes in the 1700s • In the middle of the 18th century the demand for cloth – especially cotton – grew very fast because:
- 21. More cotton The population was growing so more clothes were needed
- 22. More cotton Many people had more money than in the past and so wanted more clothes and better cloth
- 23. More cotton The price of cotton fell because of imports from the slave-worked cotton plantations in the southern states of the US – more people could afford cotton clothes.
- 24. More cotton • How could the clothiers get enough cloth to meet demand? • Could the workers in their homes make enough? • No! • They needed to speed up weaving
- 25. Speed up weaving • In 1733 a weaver called John Kay invented a flying shuttle • He put a spring at each side of the loom with strings attached to the shuttle • It meant weavers could make wider cloth and work faster
- 26. Flying shuttle
- 27. • Weavers were worried as they thought they would lose their jobs. • As people were weaving faster they needed more yarn! • Spinners couldn’t keep up with making enough yarn – it now needed 5 spinners to make enough thread for 1 weaver
- 28. Speed up spinning • How could enough yarn be made to keep up with the new faster weaving? • In 1764 James Hargreaves developed the Spinning Jenny • The early ones spun 8 spindles at once – soon as many as 16 or 20 sppindles of yarn could be spun at once in a weaver’s cottage – like this Spinning Jenny which you will see at Quarry Bank Mill…
- 29. Spinning Jenny
- 30. Factories • The Flying Shuttle and the Spinning Jenny only really speeded up production in cottages and people’s homes. • To keep up with the demand for cotton cloth a new way of producing it developed… in factories or mills where it could be made quickly in big quantities
- 31. The First Cotton Mill • The first cotton mill was built by Richard Arkwright who was an inventor and businessman. • He invented the spinning frame in 1769 which could spin lots of strong yarn quickly but it was too big and heavy to be used in homes. The power came from horses at first and then water which gave it the name water frame.
- 33. In 1771 Cromford and his partner (Strutt who was a stocking manufacturer and inventor) built the first water-powered factory at Cromford
- 34. Why Cromford? • Arkwright built his factory at Cromford in Derbyshire because of the water from the river which gave a huge amount of power to his machinery • He also had workers available - the wives and children of the men who worked in the nearby leadmine who would work in the factories. (Soon other people moved to the area for the new work.)
- 35. The women and children made the thread in the factory – but the men wove the thread into fabric in new cottages that Arkwright built for them with big windows to give good light
- 36. The industry grows • Arkwright’s first factory was so successful he built another in Manchester. • Other Manchester cotton manufacturers copied his Water Frame and so the industry grew quickly • The new way of working was so successful that raw cotton imports went up nine fold between 1780 and 1800 – look at the green line on this diagram…
- 38. Samuel Crompton’s Spinning Mule • The next big invention was Samuel Crompton’s Spinning Mule which spun lots strong but fine yarn that could be woven to make very high quality fabric • This one is was made a little later but you will see it when you visit the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry
- 39. Spinning Mule
- 40. Look at the number of spindles and how few people are needed to work the Mule
- 41. Look at the child sweeping up under the machine on the right – there were sometimes accidents
- 42. Quarry Bank Mill • Tomorrow you are going to visit a mill which is also a museum. They have examples of lots of these pieces of equipment and they still work and produce cotton textiles.
- 43. • Much of the work was done by apprentices – young people who were taught skills in return for food, a bed, some education and medicine. • Quarry Bank was much better at looking after the young workers than many factories.
- 44. Workhouse children and the mills • The child in this next video worked at Quarry Bank Mill and in this video they show some of the machinery you will see when you visit! • The child came from a workhouse (where very poor people lived when they couldn’t afford to feed themselves). Often they were orphans – they had no parents. • The workhouses were very unpleasant places and to get a job in a factory was a better option.
- 45. Robert Blincoe – child at Quarry Bank
- 46. Now to speed up weaving! • Now that spinning was mechanised and produced great quantities of yarn, weaving had to catch up – weavers could not weave the yarn fast enough. • The Reverend Edmund Cartwright (a priest who was very clever but knew nothing about weaving) invented new power loom. It wasn’t very successful and angry handloom weavers set his Manchester factory on fire, worried that it would put them out of business.
- 47. Power looms • Other inventors worked to improve on Cartwright’s power loom and by 1810 the first really practical power looms were in use. • By 1820 they were very common! This diagram shows the increase in power looms 1813-50
- 48. This is the weaving room at Quarry Bank – the power looms were powered by water – and later by steam
- 49. By 1830s • All stages of production had been mechanised so there were machines which could quickly do every stage of production – even carding
- 50. Steam! • In 1800 almost all textile mills were water powered – there were steam engines in other industries but not in textiles as they were expensive and they used a lot of coal which was difficult to transport. This is the wheel at Quarry Bank.
- 51. Steam! • But soon there were no more good water-side sites to build factories on and it was easier to move the coal around as new canals had been built
- 52. Steam! Steam power changed the location of the textile industry. Factories didn’t need to be next to rivers. This is a model steam engine at Quarry Bank
- 53. Steam! • And this is one of Quarry Banks’ real steam engines
- 54. Steam! • By 1850 new cotton mills were mainly steam powered and the main reason for choosing a site for a textile mill was to be close to coal. That’s why Manchester developed as a centre of the cotton industry • This is a steam-powered Manchester cotton mill in 1835
- 55. Cottonopolis • Between 1773 and 1801 the population of Manchester increased nearly x4 from 22,500 to 84,000 – largely due to the cotton industry growing incredibly fast there.
- 56. Cottonopolis • Manchester became known as Cottonopolis – the City of Cotton – because of the size of the cotton industry there and its worldwide importance. It was the ‘hub’ or centre of the world’s cotton industry by 1830.
- 57. Why Manchester? • Cotton could be imported to the nearby port of Liverpool from the slave plantations in the United States.
- 58. Why Manchester? • The Bridgewater Canal was extended linking Liverpool to Manchester so the cotton could be carried on barges from the coast to the city. This is a factory in Ancoats in Manchester in 1820 – see how close to the canal it is! • We have already heard that Manchester was close to where the coal was mined. Coal came on canal barges too.
- 59. Why Manchester? • ThIn 1830, Manchester was again at the forefront of transport technology with the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway - the steam trains transported the raw materials and the finished textiles between Liverpool and Manchester –soon they connected to Birmingham, London and Hull.
- 60. Why Manchester • Manchester had a humid atmosphere ideal for cotton (damp but not too cold). That stopped the yarn from breaking.
- 61. Why Manchester • The textile industry was also supported by the huge insurance and banking sector in Manchester
- 62. Why Manchester? • Other cotton industries developed there too - bleach works (to whiten the fabric), textile printers (using blocks like these), and engineering workshops and foundries (making and looking after the machinery)
- 63. Life in the factories • Most employers had spent lots of money in their mills and thought they should run as long as possible to make a profit. That meant very long hours and extremely hard work for the men, women and children working there. • We have lots of accounts written about what factories were like in the 1800s: reports written by people who visited, diaries, novels…
- 64. North and South • North and South was a novel written in 1855 and told the story of a young woman called Margaret who moves to a town called Milton (based on Manchester) and the novel looked at the lives of people working in the cotton industry… • Here Margaret visits the inside of a cotton factory for the first time.
- 65. North and South DVD Episode One Scene 3 11.27-16.00 Why do you think the manager got so angry with the worker who had a pipe for smoking tobacco?
- 66. Entertainment • Life wasn’t always sad – people tried to entertain themselves too. By dancing for example!
- 67. Over to you! • Now you are going to find out more about the textile industry and mills in the past and to get information about Quarry Bank Mill which you will be visiting. • You need to find this page on the internet as it will link to some of the answers: http://cambriatextileindustry.blogspot.co.uk • Some answers are in the books • Write your answers on the sheets