In the 1770s and 1780s, the cotton textile industry took the first major step toward the Industrial Revolution with the creation of the modern factory.
THE COTTON INDUSTRY Already in the eighteenth century, Great Britain had surged ahead in the production of cheap cotton goods using the traditional methods of the cottage industry. The development of the flying shuttle had sped the process of weaving on a loom, enabling weavers to double their output. This caused shortages of yarn, however, until James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, perfected by 1768, enabled spinners to produce yarn in greater quantities. Richard Arkwright’s water frame spinning machine, powered by water or horse, and Samuel Crompton’s so-called mule, which combined aspects of the water frame and the spinning jenny, increased yarn production even more. Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, invented in 1787, allowed the weaving of cloth to catch up with the spinning of yarn. Even then, early power looms were grossly inefficient, enabling home-based hand-loom weavers to continue to prosper, at least until the rnid-1820s. After that, they were gradually replaced by the new machines. In 1813, there were 2,400 power looms in operation in Great Britain; they numbered 14,150 in 1820, 100,000 in 1833, and 250,000 by 1850. In the 1820s, there were still 250,000 handloom weavers in Britain; by 1860, only 3,000 were left.
The water frame, Crompton’s mule, and power looms presented new opportunities to entrepreneurs. It was much more efficient to bring workers to the machines and organize their labor collectively in factories located next to rivers and streams, the sources of power for many of these brought the laborers and their families to live in the new towns that rapidly grew up around the factories.
The early devices used to speed up the processes of spinning and weaving were the products of weavers and spinners – in effect, of artisan tinkerers. But the subsequent expansion of the cotton industry and the ongoing demand for even more cotton goods created additional pressure for new and more complicated technology. The invention that pushed the cotton industry to even greater heights of productivity was the steam engine.
THE STEAM ENGINE The steam engine revolutionized the production of cotton goods and allowed the factory system to spread to other areas of production, thereby securing whole new industries. The steam engine thus ensured the triumph of the Industrial Revolution.
In the 1760s, a Scottish engineer, James Watt (1736-1819), created an engine powered by steam that could pump water from mines three times as quickly as previous engines. In 1782, Watt expanded the possibilities of the steam engine when he developed a rotary engine that could turn a shaft and thus drive machinery. Steam power could now be applied to spinning and weaving cotton, and before long, cotton mills using steam engines were multiplying across Britain. Because steam engines were fired by coal, they did not need to be located near rivers; entrepreneurs now had greater flexibility in their choice of location.
The new boost given to cotton textile production by technological changes became readily apparent. In 1760, Britain had imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton, which was farmed out to cottage industries. In 1787, the British imported 22 million pounds of cotton; most of it was spun on machines, some powered by water in large mills. By 1840, fully 366 million pounds of cotton – now Britain’s most important product in value – were imported. By this time, most cotton industry employees worked in factories. The cheapest labor in India could not compete in quality or quantity with Britain. British cotton goods sold everywhere in the world. And in Britain itself, cheap cotton cloth made it possible for millions of poor people to wear undergarments, long a luxury of the rich, who could afford expensive linen cloth. Cotton clothing was tough, comfortable, cheap, and easily washable.
The steam engine proved indispensable. Unlike horses, the steam engine was a tireless source of power and depended for fuel on a substance – coal – that seemed unlimited in quantity. The popular saying that “steam is an Englishman” had real significance by 1850. The success of the steam engine led to a need for more coal and an expansion in coal production; between 1815 and 1850, the output of coal quadrupled. In turn, new processes using coal furthered the development of the iron industry.
THE IRON INDUSTRY The British iron industry was radically transformed during the Industrial Revolution. Britain had large deposits of iron ore, but at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the basic process of producing iron had changed little since the Middle Ages and still depended heavily on charcoal. In the early eighteenth century, new methods of smelting iron ore to produce cast iron were devised, based on the use of coke or “courke” that was made by slowly burning coal. Coke could heat iron ore at a faster rate than charcoal, thus yielding higher amounts. Still, a better quality of iron was not possible until the 1780s, when Henry Cort developed a process called puddling in which coke was used to burn away impurities in pig iron (the product of smelting iron ore with coke) to produce an iron of high quality called wrought iron. Wrought iron, with its lower carbon content, was malleable and able to withstand strain. A boom then ensued in the British iron industry. In 1740, Britain produced 17,000 tons of iron; in the 1780s, almost 70,000 tons; by the 1840s, more than 2 million tons; and by 1852, almost 3 million tons, more than the rest of the world combined.
The development of the iron industry was in many ways a response to the demand for the new machines. The high-quality wrought iron produced by the Cort process made it the most widely used metal until the production of cheaper steel in the 1860s. The growing supply of less costly metal encouraged the use of machinery in other industries, most noticeably in new means of transportation.
The railways got their start in mining operations in Germany as early as 1500 and in British coal mines after 1600, where small handcarts filled with coal were pushed along parallel wooden rails. The rails reduced friction, enabling horses to haul more substantial loads. By 1700, some entrepreneurs began to replace wooden rails with cast-iron rails, and by the early nineteenth century, railways – still dependent on horsepower – were common in British mining and industrial districts. The development of the steam engine led to a radical transformation of the railways.
In 1804, Richard Trevithick (TREV-uh-thik) pioneered the first steam-powered locomotive on an industrial rail line in southern Wales. It pulled 10 tons of ore and seventy people at 5 miles per hour. Better locomotives soon followed. The engines built by George Stephenson and his son proved superior, and it was in their workshops in Newcastle-upon-Tyne that the locomotives for the first modern railways in Britain were built. George Stephenson’s Rocket was used on the first public railway line, which opened in 1830, extending 32 miles from Liverpool to Manchester. Rocket sped along at 16 miles per hour. Within twenty years, locomotives had reached 50 miles per hour, an incredible speed to contemporary passengers. During the same period, new companies were formed to build additional railroads as the infant industry proved successful financially as well as technically. In 1840, Britain had almost 2,000 miles of railroads; by 1850, 6,000 miles of railroad track crisscrossed much of the country (see Map 20.1).
The railroad contributed significantly to the maturing of the Industrial Revolution. The railroad’s demands for coal and iron furthered the growth of those industries. British supremacy in civil and mechanical engineering, so evident after 1840, was in large part based on the skills acquired in railway building. The huge capital demands necessary for railway construction encouraged a whole new group of middle-class investors to invest their money in joint-stock companies (see “Industrialization on the Continent” later in this chapter). Railway construction created new job opportunities, especially for farm laborers and peasants, who had long been accustomed to finding work outside their local villages. Perhaps most important, a cheaper and faster means of transportation had a rippling effect on the growth of an industrial economy. By reducing the price of goods, larger markets were created; increased sales necessitated more factories and more machinery, thereby reinforcing the self-sustaining nature of the Industrial Revolution, which marked a fundamental break with the traditional European economy. The great productivity of the Industrial Revolution enabled entrepreneurs to reinvest their profits in new capital equipment, further expanding the productive capacity of the economy. Continuous, even rapid, self-sustaining economic growth came to be seen as a fundamental characteristic of the new industrial economy.
The railroad was the perfect symbol of this aspect of the Industrial Revolution. The ability to transport goods and people at dramatic speeds also provided visible confirmation of a new sense of power. When railway engineers penetrated mountains with tunnels and spanned chasms with breathtaking bridges, contemporaries experienced a sense of power over nature not felt before in Western civilization.
THE INDUSTRIAL FACTORY Initially the product of the cotton industry, the factory became the chief means of organizing labor for the new machines. As the workplace shifted from the artisan’s shop and the peasant’s cottage to the factory, the latter was not viewed as just a larger work unit. Employers hired workers who no longer owned the means of production but were simply paid wages to run the machines.
From its beginning, the factory system demanded a new type of discipline from its employees. Factory owners could not afford to let their expensive machinery stand idle. Workers were forced to work regular hours and in shifts to keep the machines producing at a steady pace for maximum output. This represented a massive adjustment for early factory laborers.
Preindustrial workers were not accustomed to a timed format. Agricultural laborers had always kept irregular hours; hectic work at harvest time might be followed by weeks of inactivity. Even in the burgeoning cottage industry of the eighteenth century, weavers and spinners who worked at home might fulfill their weekly quotas by working around the clock for two or three days and then proceeding at a leisurely pace until the next week’s demands forced another work spurt.
Factory owners therefore faced a formidable task. They had to create a system of time-work discipline that would accustom employees to working regular, unvarying hours during which they performed a set number of tasks over and over again as efficiently as possible. One early industrialist said that his aim was “to make such machines of the men as cannot err.” Such work, of course, tended to be repetitive and boring, and factory owners resorted to tough methods to accomplish their goals. Factory regulations were minute and detailed (see the box on p. 603). Adult workers were fined for a wide variety of minor infractions, such as being a few minutes late for work, and dismissed for more serious misdoings, especially drunkenness. Drunkenness was viewed as particularly offensive because it set a bad example for younger workers and also courted disaster amid dangerous machinery. Employers found that dismissals and fines worked well for adult employees; in a time when great population growth had led to large numbers of unskilled workers, dismissal could be disastrous. Children were less likely to understand the implications of dismissal, so they were sometimes disciplined more directly – by beating.
The efforts of factory owners in the early Industrial Revolution to impose a new set of values were frequently reinforced by the new evangelical churches. Methodism, in particular, emphasized that people “reborn in Jesus” must forgo immoderation and follow a disciplined path. Laziness and wasteful habits were sinful. The acceptance of hardship in this life paved the way for the joys of the next. Evangelical values paralleled the efforts of the new factory owners to instill laborers with their own middle-class values of hard work, discipline, and thrift. In one crucial sense, the early industrialists proved successful. As the nineteenth century progressed, the second and third generations of workers came to view a regular working week as a natural way of life. It was, of course, an attitude that made possible Britain’s incredible economic growth in that century.
In 1851, the British organized the world’s first industrial fair. It was housed at Kensington in London in the Crystal Palace, an enormous structure made entirely of glass and iron, a tribute to British engineering skills. Covering 19 acres, the Crystal Palace contained 100,000 exhibits that displayed the wide variety of products created by the Industrial Revolution. Six million people visited the fair in six months. Though most of them were Britons who had traveled to London by train, foreign visitors were also prominent. The Great Exhibition displayed Britain’s wealth to the world; it was a gigantic demonstration of British success. Even trees were brought inside the Crystal Palace as a visible symbol of how the Industrial Revolution had achieved human domination over nature. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, expressed the sentiments of the age when he described the exhibition as a sign that “man is approaching a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission which he has to perform in this world ... to conquer nature to his use.” Not content with that, he also linked British success to divine will: “In promoting [the progress of the human race], we are accomplishing the will of the great and blessed God.”
In addition to demonstrating Britain’s enormous industrial growth, the Crystal Palace exhibition also represented British imperial power. Goods from India were a highlight of the exhibition, and the East India Company drew attention to its role in India with exhibits of cotton, tea, and flax. But it was the display of Indian silks, jewels, shawls, and an elephant canopy that captured the attention of the British press and visitors. Despite the public interest in the ornate and intricate works from India, many British commentators, such as the scientist William Whewell, were less complimentary. They characterized the Indian handmade goods as typical of a system in which “tens of thousands” worked for a few despots. Moreover, these goods were examples of the “wasteful and ridiculous excess” of the labor-intensive production practices in the East, which could not compare to enlightened British labor practices.
By the year of the Great Exhibition, Great Britain had become the world’s first industrial nation and its wealthiest. Britain was the “workshop, banker, and trader of the world.” It produced one-half of the world’s coal and manufactured goods; its cotton industry alone in 1851 was equal in size to the industries of all other European countries combined. The quantity of goods produced was growing at three times the rate in 1780. Britain’s certainty about its mission in the world in the nineteenth century was grounded in its incredible material success.
