The Industrial Revolution

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, India, China, and regions of Iraq and elsewhere in Asia and the Middle East produced most of the world's cotton cloth while Europeans produced wool and linen goods. The cloth was produced in family units who either made cloth for themselves or to market. Production was very labour intensive and small scale. The Industrial Revolution started in the UK and spread to the rest of the world (See graphic below). It had a profound effect on Lochwinnoch as it did everywhere.

But when was it, what was it and how did it come about? It started in earnest from 1760/80 and was in full swing by the 1830’s. In simple terms it was the mechanisation of processes that had hitherto been carried out by hand. Output greatly increased and there was also an unpreceded growth in the population

It demanded new ideas for managing large groups of people. Tensions grew between the very rich and the poorest people within society because of the visible poverty on one hand and growing population and materialistic wealth on the other. This led to philosophical ideas such as socialism, communism and anarchism. Some economists thought the most important effect of the Industrial Revolution was that the standard of living for the general population in the Western world began to increase consistently for the first time in history, although others have said that it did not begin to improve meaningfully until the late 19th and 20th centuries.

So how did this revolution come about. Six factors facilitated industrialisation;

1. High levels of agricultural productivity to provide excess manpower and food;

2. A pool of managerial and entrepreneurial skills;

3. Available ports, rivers, canals, and roads to cheaply move raw materials and outputs;

4. Natural resources such as coal, iron, and waterfalls;

5. Political stability and a legal system that supported business;

6. Financial capital available to invest.

Britain met the criteria and industrialisation started in the 18th century, it was taken up in western Europe (especially Belgium, France, and the German states) in the early 19th century. The United States copied the British model in the early 19th century, and Japan copied the Western European models in the late 19th century.

But these 6 factors needed something to industrialise and this is where a small number of innovations were critical in providing the end use product that could benefit from these factors. That end use product was textiles and the innovations were as follows. Before the 18th century, the manufacture of cloth was performed by individual workers at home. Typically the husband operated the handloom and his wife could make sufficient yarn for that loom. Two systems had developed for spinning but neither of these could produce enough thread for the looms after the invention by John Kay in 1733 of the flying shuttle. It enabled cloth to be woven faster, of a greater width, and the process could be mechanised making the loom even more productive.

The production of thread for looms became the bottleneck. In 1738, Lewis Paul and John Wyatt, patented the Roller Spinning machine and the flyer-and-bobbin system, for drawing wool to a more even thickness. In 1743 a factory was opened in Northampton where fifty spindles turned on five of Paul and Wyatt's machines and operated until 1764.

In 1748 Lewis Paul invented the hand driven carding machine. Lewis's invention was later developed and improved by Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton. In 1758: Paul and Wyatt improved their roller spinning machine. Richard Arkwright later used this as the model for his water frame.

The multiple spindle spinning jenny was invented in 1764 by James Hargreaves. This machine increased the thread production capacity of a single worker, initially eightfold and subsequently much further. Richard Arkwright’s first spinning mill, Cromford Mill (see photograph below taken on 10th July 2021), Derbyshire, was built in 1771. It contained his invention the water frame. The water frame was developed from the spinning frame that Arkwright had developed with (a different) John Kay, from Warrington. 

Samuel Crompton of Bolton combined elements of the spinning jenny and water frame in 1779, creating the spinning mule. This mule produced a stronger thread than the water frame could. Thus in 1780, there were two viable hand-operated spinning systems that could be easily adapted to run by the power of water. In 1793 Eli Whitney invented and patented the cotton gin, which sped up the processing of raw cotton by over 50 times.

Power became a key ingredient. The developments described above could be easily scaled up requiring much more power than a man could provide. The power from a horse was too erratic for thread production. The use of waterwheels was well understood and was the obvious solution to the additional energy requirements to drive these devices.

The improved steam engine invented by James Watt and patented in 1775 was initially mainly used for pumping out mines, for water supply systems and to a lesser extend to power air blast for blast furnaces, but from the 1780s was also applied to power textile machines. This enabled rapid development of efficient semi-automated factories on a previously unimaginable scale in places where waterpower was not available or not steady throughout the seasons. See Appendix for Watts source of inspiration.

In the Iron industry, coke was finally applied to all stages of iron smelting, replacing charcoal. Using a steam engine to power blast air to blast furnaces made higher furnace temperatures possible, which allowed the use of more lime to tie up the Sulphur in coal or coke. The steam engine also overcame the shortage of water power for iron works. Iron production surged after the 1750s when steam engines were increasingly used providing more material to make more machines!

These represent three area’s, in which there were key innovations, which allowed the economic take-off by which the Industrial Revolution is usually defined. Later inventions such as the power loom and Richard Trevithick's high pressure steam engine were also important in the growing industrialisation of Britain. The application of steam engines to powering cotton mills and  ironworks enabled these to be built in places that were most convenient because other resources were available, rather than where there was water to power a watermill.

The illustration below by Simon Netchev provides a concise summary of the key developments behind the industrial revolution.

Returning to the development of the textile industry during the industrial revolution, Britain formed the East India Company in 1600 to trade in the region of the Indian Ocean. By the mid 1760’s cotton textiles produced in India were over 75% of the East India Company exports. They were in demand in the North Atlantic region where previously only wool and linen were available. Britain could not compete with Indian cloth because wages were 1/6th of those in Britain. In 1700 and 1721 Britian introduced restriction on Indian textiles to protect the home wool and linen markets. Imports of raw cotton were not banned and by 1750 Britain imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton. By 1787 it had risen to 22 million pounds, then 52 million by 1800 and 588 million by 1850.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, much of the imported cotton came from plantations in the American South. In periods of political uncertainty in North America, the Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, Britain relied more heavily on imports from the Indian subcontinent to supply its cotton manufacturing industry. Ports on the west coast of Britain, such as Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow, became important in determining the sites of the cotton industry. Lancashire became a centre for the nascent cotton industry because the damp climate was better for spinning the yarn. Likewise, Glasgow benefited from the same damp climate.

The traditional centres of hand textile production such as India, parts of the Middle East, could not withstand the competition from machine-made textiles, which over a period of decades destroyed the handmade textile industries and left millions of people without work, many of whom starved. The Industrial Revolution generated an enormous and unprecedented change in the economic division in the world, as shown by the changing Gross Domestic Product figures below for the period 1700, 1913 and 2008. 

Appendix:-

Thomas Newcomen invented the atmospheric steam engine in 1712. In the early 1760’s a young James Watt repaired the model steam engine photographed below for the University of Glasgow. It is on display in the Hunterian Museum of Glasgow University. It was while repairing this device that he got his ideas for the improvements in the technology that led to practical steam engines.