250 Years of Cromford Cotton Mill - Started Production in 1772 - 250 years in 2022 by Prof. Christoph Roser
https://www.allaboutlean.com/250-years-cromford-mill/
Pre-mechanized European textile production
By 1600 Flemish refugees began weaving cotton cloth in English towns.
British cloth could not compete with Indian cloth because India's labour cost was approximately one-fifth to one-sixth that of Britain's. In 1700 and 1721 the British government passed Calico Acts to protect the domestic woollen and linen industries from the increasing amounts of cotton fabric imported from India. The demand for heavier fabric was met by a domestic industry based around Lancashire that produced fustian, a cloth with flax warp and cotton weft. Flax was used for the warp because wheel-spun cotton did not have sufficient strength, but the resulting blend was not as soft as 100% cotton and was more difficult to sew.
On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, spinning and weaving were done in households, for domestic consumption, and for sale under the putting-out system. Under the putting-out system, home-based workers produced under contract to merchant sellers, who often supplied the raw materials. In the off-season the women, typically farmers' wives, did the spinning and the men did the weaving. Using the spinning wheel, it took anywhere from four to eight spinners to supply one handloom weaver.
Invention of textile machinery
The flying shuttle, patented in 1733 by John Kay, with a number of subsequent improvements including an important one in 1747, doubled the output of a weaver. It became widely used around Lancashire after 1760 when John's son, Robert, invented the dropbox, which facilitated changing thread colors.
Lewis Paul patented the roller spinning frame and the flyer-and-bobbin system for drawing wool to a more even thickness. The technology was developed with the help of John Wyatt of Birmingham. Paul and Wyatt opened a mill in Birmingham which used their new rolling machine powered by a donkey. In 1743 a factory opened in Northampton with 50 spindles on each of five of Paul and Wyatt's machines. This operated until about 1764. A similar mill was built by Daniel Bourn in Leominster, but this burnt down. Both Lewis Paul and Daniel Bourn patented carding machines in 1748. Based on two sets of rollers that travelled at different speeds, it was later used in the first cotton spinning mill. Lewis's invention was later developed and improved by Richard Arkwright in his water frame and Samuel Crompton in his spinning mule.
In 1764 in the village of Stanhill, Lancashire, James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which he patented in 1770. It was the first practical spinning frame with multiple spindles. The jenny worked in a similar manner to the spinning wheel, by first clamping down on the fibres, then by drawing them out, followed by twisting. It was a simple, wooden framed machine that only cost about £6 for a 40-spindle model in 1792, and was used mainly by home spinners. The jenny produced a lightly twisted yarn only suitable for weft, not warp.
The spinning frame or water frame was developed by Richard Arkwright who, along with two partners, patented it in 1769. The design was partly based on a spinning machine built for Thomas High by clockmaker John Kay, who was hired by Arkwright. For each spindle the water frame used a series of four pairs of rollers, each operating at a successively higher rotating speed, to draw out the fibre, which was then twisted by the spindle. The roller spacing was slightly longer than the fibre length.
Too close a spacing caused the fibres to break while too distant a spacing caused uneven thread. The top rollers were leather-covered and loading on the rollers was applied by a weight. The weights kept the twist from backing up before the rollers. The bottom rollers were wood and metal, with fluting along the length. The water frame was able to produce a hard, medium-count thread suitable for warp, finally allowing 100% cotton cloth to be made in Britain. A horse powered the first factory to use the spinning frame. Arkwright and his partners used water power at a factory in Cromford, Derbyshire in 1771, giving the invention its name, water frame.
Samuel Crompton's Spinning Mule was introduced in 1779. Mule implies a hybrid because it was a combination of the spinning jenny and the water frame, in which the spindles were placed on a carriage, which went through an operational sequence during which the rollers stopped while the carriage moved away from the drawing roller to finish drawing out the fibres as the spindles started rotating. Crompton's mule was able to produce finer thread than hand spinning and at a lower cost. Mule spun thread was of suitable strength to be used as a warp and finally allowed Britain to produce highly competitive yarn in large quantities.
Edmund Cartwright developed a vertical power loom which he patented in 1785. In 1776 he patented a two-man operated loom which was more conventional. Cartwright built two factories; the first burned down and the second was sabotaged by his workers. Cartwright's loom design had several flaws and Samuel Horrocks patented a fairly successful loom in 1813. Horock's loom was improved by Richard Roberts in 1822 and these were produced in large numbers by Roberts, Hill & Co.
The demand for cotton presented an opportunity to planters in the Southern United States. They were looking for a mechanical way to remove the seed. Eli Whitney responded to the challenge by inventing the inexpensive cotton gin. A man using a cotton gin could remove seed from in one day which took a woman two months to process earlier.
These advances were capitalised on by entrepreneurs, of whom the best known is Richard Arkwright. Arkwright nurtured the inventors, patented the ideas, financed the initiatives, and protected the machines. He created the cotton mill which brought the production processes together in a factory, and he developed the use of power—first horsepower and then water power—which made cotton manufacture a mechanised industry. Other inventors increased the efficiency of the individual steps of spinning (carding, twisting and spinning, and rolling) so that the supply of yarn increased greatly. Before long steam power was applied to drive textile machinery. Manchester acquired the nickname Cottonopolis during the early 19th century owing to its sprawl of textile factories.
Although mechanization dramatically decreased the cost of cotton cloth, by the mid-19th century machine-woven cloth still could not equal the quality of hand-woven Indian cloth, in part due to the fineness of thread made possible by the type of cotton used in India, which allowed high thread counts. However, the high productivity of British textile manufacturing allowed coarser grades of British cloth to undersell hand-spun and woven fabric even in low-wage India, eventually destroying the industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
https://www.britannica.com/event/Industrial-Revolution/The-first-Industrial-Revolution
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