man-made textile industry

1) промышленность

2) отрасль промышленности

3) фирма; предприятие

SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering, Textiles

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Richard Roberts was the son of a shoemaker and tollkeeper and received only an elementary education at the village school. At the age of 10 his interest in mechanics was stimulated when he was allowed by the Curate, the Revd Griffith Howell, to use his lathe and other tools. As a young man Roberts acquired a considerable local reputation for his mechanical skills, but these were exercised only in his spare time. For many years he worked in the local limestone quarries, until at the age of 20 he obtained employment as a pattern-maker in Staffordshire. In the next few years he worked as a mechanic in Liverpool, Manchester and Salford before moving in 1814 to London, where he obtained employment with Henry Maudslay. In 1816 he set up on his own account in Manchester. He soon established a reputation there for gear-cutting and other general engineering work, especially for the textile industry, and by 1821 he was employing about twelve men. He built machine tools mainly for his own use, including, in 1817, one of the first planing machines.

One of his first inventions was a gas meter, but his first patent was obtained in 1822 for improvements in looms. His most important contribution to textile technology was his invention of the self-acting spinning mule, patented in 1825. The normal fourteen-year term of this patent was extended in 1839 by a further seven years. Between 1826 and 1828 Roberts paid several visits to Alsace, France, arranging cottonspinning machinery for a new factory at Mulhouse. By 1826 he had become a partner in the firm of Sharp Brothers, the company then becoming Sharp, Roberts \& Co. The firm continued to build textile machinery, and in the 1830s it built locomotive engines for the newly created railways and made one experimental steam-carriage for use on roads. The partnership was dissolved in 1843, the Sharps establishing a new works to continue locomotive building while Roberts retained the existing factory, known as the Globe Works, where he soon after took as partners R.G.Dobinson and Benjamin Fothergill (1802–79). This partnership was dissolved c. 1851, and Roberts continued in business on his own for a few years before moving to London as a consulting engineer.

During the 1840s and 1850s Roberts produced many new inventions in a variety of fields, including machine tools, clocks and watches, textile machinery, pumps and ships. One of these was a machine controlled by a punched-card system similar to the Jacquard loom for punching rivet holes in plates. This was used in the construction of the Conway and Menai Straits tubular bridges. Roberts was granted twenty-six patents, many of which, before the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852, covered more than one invention; there were still other inventions he did not patent. He made his contribution to the discussion which led up to the 1852 Act by publishing, in 1830 and 1833, pamphlets suggesting reform of the Patent Law.

In the early 1820s Roberts helped to establish the Manchester Mechanics' Institute, and in 1823 he was elected a member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester. He frequently contributed to their proceedings and in 1861 he was made an Honorary Member. He was elected a Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1838. From 1838 to 1843 he served as a councillor of the then-new Municipal Borough of Manchester. In his final years, without the assistance of business partners, Roberts suffered financial difficulties, and at the time of his death a fund for his aid was being raised.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Heathcote was the son of a small farmer who became blind, obliging the family to move to Long Whatton, near Loughborough, c.1790. He was apprenticed to W.Shepherd, a hosiery-machine maker, and became a frame-smith in the hosiery industry. He moved to Nottingham where he entered the employment of an excellent machine maker named Elliott. He later joined William Caldwell of Hathern, whose daughter he had married. The lace-making apparatus they patented jointly in 1804 had already been anticipated, so Heathcote turned to the problem of making pillow lace, a cottage industry in which women made lace by arranging pins stuck in a pillow in the correct pattern and winding around them thread contained on thin bobbins. He began by analysing the complicated hand-woven lace into simple warp and weft threads and found he could dispense with half the bobbins. The first machine he developed and patented, in 1808, made narrow lace an inch or so wide, but the following year he made much broader lace on an improved version. In his second patent, in 1809, he could make a type of net curtain, Brussels lace, without patterns. His machine made bobbin-net by the use of thin brass discs, between which the thread was wound. As they passed through the warp threads, which were arranged vertically, the warp threads were moved to each side in turn, so as to twist the bobbin threads round the warp threads. The bobbins were in two rows to save space, and jogged on carriages in grooves along a bar running the length of the machine. As the strength of this fabric depended upon bringing the bobbin threads diagonally across, in addition to the forward movement, the machine had to provide for a sideways movement of each bobbin every time the lengthwise course was completed. A high standard of accuracy in manufacture was essential for success. Called the "Old Loughborough", it was acknowledged to be the most complicated machine so far produced. In partnership with a man named Charles Lacy, who supplied the necessary capital, a factory was established at Loughborough that proved highly successful; however, their fifty-five frames were destroyed by Luddites in 1816. Heathcote was awarded damages of £10,000 by the county of Nottingham on the condition it was spent locally, but to avoid further interference he decided to transfer not only his machines but his entire workforce elsewhere and refused the money. In a disused woollen factory at Tiverton in Devonshire, powered by the waters of the river Exe, he built 300 frames of greater width and speed. By continually making inventions and improvements until he retired in 1843, his business flourished and he amassed a large fortune. He patented one machine for silk cocoon-reeling and another for plaiting or braiding. In 1825 he brought out two patents for the mechanical ornamentation or figuring of lace. He acquired a sound knowledge of French prior to opening a steam-powered lace factory in France. The factory proved to be a successful venture that lasted many years. In 1832 he patented a monstrous steam plough that is reputed to have cost him over £12,000 and was claimed to be the best in its day. One of its stated aims was "improved methods of draining land", which he hoped would develop agriculture in Ireland. A cable was used to haul the implement across the land. From 1832 to 1859, Heathcote represented Tiverton in Parliament and, among other benefactions, he built a school for his adopted town.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Radcliffe was brought up in the textile industry and learned carding and spinning as a child. When he was old enough, he became a weaver. It was a time when there were not enough weavers to work up all the yarn being spun on the recently invented spinning machines, so some yarn was exported. Radcliffe regarded this as a sin; meetings were held to prohibit the export, and Radcliffe promised to use his best endeavours to discover means to work up the yarn in England. He owned a mill at Mellor and by 1801 was employing over 1,000 hand-loom weavers. He wanted to improve their efficiency so they could compete against power looms, which were beginning to be introduced at that time.

His first step was to divide up as much as possible the different weaving processes, not unlike the plan adopted by Arkwright in spinning. In order to strengthen the warp yarns made of cotton and to reduce their tendency to fray during weaving, it was customary to apply an adhesive substance such as starch paste. This was brushed on as the warp was unwound from the back beam during weaving, so only short lengths could be treated before being dried. Instead of dressing the warp in the loom as was hitherto done, Radcliffe had it dressed in a separate machine, relieving the weaver of the trouble and saving the time wasted by the method previously used. Radcliffe employed a young man names Thomas Johnson, who proved to be a clever mechanic. Radcliffe patented his inventions in Johnson's name to avoid other people, especially foreigners, finding out his ideas. He took out his first patent, for a dressing machine, in March 1803 and a second the following year. The combined result of the two patents was the introduction of a beaming machine and a dressing machine which, in addition to applying the paste to the yarns and then drying them, wound them onto a beam ready for the loom. These machines enabled the weaver to work a loom with fewer stoppages; however, Radcliffe did not anticipate that his method of sizing would soon be applied to power looms as well and lead to the commercial success of powered weaving. Other manufacturers quickly adopted Radcliffe's system, and Radcliffe himself soon had to introduce power looms in his own business.

Radcliffe improved the hand looms themselves when, with the help of Johnson, he devised a cloth taking-up motion that wound the woven cloth onto a roller automatically as the weaver operated the loom. Radcliffe and Johnson also developed the "dandy loom", which was a more compact form of hand loom and was also later adapted for weaving by power. Radcliffe was among the witnesses before the Parliamentary Committee which in 1808 awarded Edmund Cartwright a grant for his invention of the power loom. Later Radcliffe was unsuccessfully to petition Parliament for a similar reward for his contributions to the introduction of power weaving. His business affairs ultimately failed partly through his own obstinacy and his continued opposition to the export of cotton yarn. He lived to be 81 years old and was buried in Mellor churchyard.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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John Heathcote had shown that it was possible to make lace by machine with his patents of 1808 and 1809. His machines were developed and improved by John Levers. Levers was originally a hosiery frame-smith and setter-up at Sutton-in-Ashfield but moved to Nottingham, where he extended his operations to the construction of point-net and warp-lace machinery. In the years 1812 and 1813 he more or less isolated himself in the garret of a house in Derby Road, where he assembled his lacemaking machine by himself. He was helped by two brothers and a nephew who made parts, but they saw it only when it was completed. Financial help for making production machines came from the firm of John Stevenson \& Skipwith, lace manufacturers in Nottingham. Levers never sought a patent, as he was under the mistaken impression that additions or improvements to an existing patented machine could not be protected. An early example of the machine survives at the Castle Museum in Nottingham. Although his prospects must have seemed good, for some reason Levers dissolved his partnership with Stevenson \& Co. and continued to work on improving his machine. In 1817 he altered it from the horizontal to the upright position, building many of the machines each year. He was a friendly, kind-hearted man, but he seems to have been unable to apply himself to his business, preferring the company of musicians—he was a bandmaster of the local militia—and was soon frequently without money, even to buy food for his family. He emigrated in 1821 to Rouen, France, where he set up his lace machines and where he subsequently died; when or in what circumstances is unknown. His machine continued to be improved and was adapted to work with the Jacquard mechanism to select the pattern.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Synthetic materials, Textiles

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Cross was educated at the universities of London, Zurich and Manchester. It was at Owens College, Manchester, that Cross first met E.J. Bevan and where these two first worked together on the nature of cellulose. After gaining some industrial experience, Cross joined Bevan to set up a partnership in London as analytical and consulting chemists, specializing in the chemistry and technology of cellulose and lignin. They were at the Jodrell laboratory, Kew Gardens, for a time and then set up their own laboratory at Station Avenue, Kew Gardens. In 1888, the first edition of their joint publication A Textbook of Paper-making, appeared. It went into several editions and became the standard reference and textbook on the subject. The long introductory chapter is a discourse on cellulose.

In 1892, Cross, Bevan and Clayton Beadle took out their historic patent on the solution and regeneration of cellulose. The modern artificial-fibre industry stems from this patent. They made their discovery at New Court, Carey Street, London: wood-pulp (or another cheap form of cellulose) was dissolved in a mixture of carbon disulphide and aqueous alkali to produce sodium xanthate. After maturing, it was squirted through fine holes into dilute acid, which set the liquid to give spinnable fibres of "viscose". However, it was many years before the process became a commercial operation, partly because the use of a natural raw material such as wood involved variations in chemical content and each batch might react differently. At first it was thought that viscose might be suitable for incandescent lamp filaments, and C.H.Stearn, a collaborator with Cross, continued to investigate this possibility, but the sheen on the fibres suggested that viscose might be made into artificial silk. The original Viscose Spinning Syndicate was formed in 1894 and a place was rented at Erith in Kent. However, it was not until some skeins of artificial silk (a term to which Cross himself objected) were displayed in Paris that textile manufacturers began to take an interest in it. It was then that Courtaulds decided to investigate this new fibre, although it was not until 1904 that they bought the English patents and developed the first artificial silk that was later called "rayon". Cross was also concerned with the development of viscose films and of cellulose acetate, which became a rival to rayon in the form of "Celanese". He retained his interest in the paper industry and in publishing, in 1895 again collaborating with Bevan and publishing a book on Cellulose and other technical articles. He was a cultured man and a good musician. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1917.

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