Power in the Industrial Revolution

A a.

1 industriale: (stor.) the Industrial Revolution, la rivoluzione industriale; an industrial school, una scuola industriale; an industrial power, una potenza industriale

2 industrializzato

B n.

1 lavoratore dell'industria

2 ( raro) industriale (sost.)

3 (pl.) (fin.) azioni (o titoli) d'imprese industriali

● industrial accident = industrial injury ► sotto □ industrial action, agitazione (o azione) sindacale □ industrial alcohol, alcol per uso industriale □ (econ.) industrial area, regione (o zona) industriale □ (econ.) industrial concentration, concentrazione industriale □ (leg., in GB) industrial court, tribunale per le controversie di lavoro □ (agric.) industrial crop, coltura industriale □ industrial design, industrial design □ an industrial disease, una malattia professionale □ (econ.) industrial disputes, conflitti del lavoro; vertenze sindacali □ (ind.) industrial emissions, scarichi industriali □ industrial estate, zona industriale □ (econ.) industrial goods, beni strumentali □ industrial injury, infortunio sul lavoro □ industrial injury legislation, legislazione infortunistica □ industrial law, diritto del lavoro □ industrial medicine, medicina del lavoro □ (econ.) industrial output, produzione industriale □ ( USA) industrial park = industrial estate ► sopra □ (econ.) industrial production index, indice della produzione industriale □ (leg.) industrial property, proprietà (o privativa) industriale □ industrial relations, relazioni industriali □ (polit.) industrial relations act, legislazione antisciopero □ industrial reorganization, riconversione industriale □ industrial safety, sicurezza sul lavoro □ industrial site, zona industriale ( d'una città) □ ( anche scherz.) industrial strength, di potenza industriale; potentissimo: industrial strength adhesive, adesivo di potenza industriale □ industrial union, sindacato di un'industria.

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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After Edmund Cartwright many people contributed to the development of the power loom. Among them was Robert Miller of Dumbartonshire, Scotland. In 1796 he took out a patent for an improved protector which stopped the loom altogether when the shuttle failed to enter its box, thus preventing breakage of the warp threads. The same patent contained the specification for his "wiper" loom. The wipers, or cams, worked the picking stick to drive the shuttle across, a feature found on most later looms. He also moved the sley by a cam in one direction and by springs in the other. His looms were still working in 1808 and may have formed the basis for power looms built in Lowell in the USA.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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John Kay was the youngest of five sons of a yeoman farmer of Walmersley, near Bury, Lancashire, who died before his birth. John was apprenticed to a reedmaker, and just before he was 21 he married a daughter of John Hall of Bury and carried on his trade in that town until 1733. It is possible that his first patent, taken out in 1730, was connected with this business because it was for an engine that made mohair thread for tailors and twisted and dressed thread; such thread could have been used to bind up the reeds used in looms. He also improved the reeds by making them from metal instead of cane strips so they lasted much longer and could be made to be much finer. His next patent in 1733, was a double one. One part of it was for a batting machine to remove dust from wool by beating it with sticks, but the patent is better known for its description of the flying shuttle. Kay placed boxes to receive the shuttle at either end of the reed or sley. Across the open top of these boxes was a metal rod along which a picking peg could slide and drive the shuttle out across the loom. The pegs at each end were connected by strings to a stick that was held in the right hand of the weaver and which jerked the shuttle out of the box. The shuttle had wheels to make it "fly" across the warp more easily, and ran on a shuttle race to support and guide it. Not only was weaving speeded up, but the weaver could produce broader cloth without any aid from a second person. This invention was later adapted for the power loom. Kay moved to Colchester and entered into partnership with a baymaker named Solomon Smith and a year later was joined by William Carter of Ballingdon, Essex. His shuttle was received with considerable hostility in both Lancashire and Essex, but it was probably more his charge of 15 shillings a year for its use that roused the antagonism. From 1737 he was much involved with lawsuits to try and protect his patent, particularly the part that specified the method of winding the thread onto a fixed bobbin in the shuttle. In 1738 Kay patented a windmill for working pumps and an improved chain pump, but neither of these seems to have been successful. In 1745, with Joseph Stell of Keighley, he patented a narrow fabric loom that could be worked by power; this type may have been employed by Gartside in Manchester soon afterwards. It was probably through failure to protect his patent rights that Kay moved to France, where he arrived penniless in 1747. He went to the Dutch firm of Daniel Scalongne, woollen manufacturers, in Abbeville. The company helped him to apply for a French patent for his shuttle, but Kay wanted the exorbitant sum of £10,000. There was much discussion and eventually Kay set up a workshop in Paris, where he received a pension of 2,500 livres. However, he was to face the same problems as in England with weavers copying his shuttle without permission. In 1754 he produced two machines for making card clothing: one pierced holes in the leather, while the other cut and sharpened the wires. These were later improved by his son, Robert Kay. Kay returned to England briefly, but was back in France in 1758. He was involved with machines to card both cotton and wool and tried again to obtain support from the French Government. He was still involved with developing textile machines in 1779, when he was 75, but he must have died soon afterwards. As an inventor Kay was a genius of the first rank, but he was vain, obstinate and suspicious and was destitute of business qualities.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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George Robinson is said to have been a Scots migrant who settled at Burwell, near Nottingham, in 1737, but there is no record of his occupation until 1771, when he was noticed as a bleacher. By 1783 he and his son were describing themselves as "merchants and thread manufacturers" as well as bleachers. For their thread, they were using the system of spinning on the waterframe, but it is not known whether they held a licence from Arkwright. Between 1776 and 1791, the firm G.J. \& J.Robinson built a series of six cotton mills with a complex of dams and aqueducts to supply them in the relatively flat land of the Leen valley, near Papplewick, to the north of Nottingham. By careful conservation they were able to obtain considerable power from a very small stream. Castle mill was not only the highest one owned by the Robinsons, but it was also the highest mill on the stream and was fed from a reservoir. The Robinsons might therefore have expected to have enjoyed uninterrupted use of the water, but above them lived Lord Byron in his estate of Newstead Priory. The fifth Lord Byron loved making ornamental ponds on his property so that he could have mock naval battles with his servants, and this tampered with the water supplies so much that the Robinsons found they were unable to work their mills.

In 1785 they decided to order a rotative steam engine from the firm of Boulton \& Watt. It was erected by John Rennie; however, misfortune seemed to dog this engine, for parts went astray to Manchester and when the engine was finally running at the end of February 1786 it was found to be out of alignment so may not have been very successful. At about the same time, the lawsuit against Lord Byron was found in favour of the Robinsons, but the engine continued in use for at least twelve years and was the first of the type which was to power virtually all steamdriven mills until the 1850s to be installed in a textile mill. It was a low-pressure double-acting condensing beam engine, with a vertical cylinder, parallel motion connecting the piston toone end of a rocking beam, and a connecting rod at the other end of the beam turning the flywheel. In this case Watt's sun and planet motion was used in place of a crank.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Arkwright was the youngest of thirteen children and was apprenticed to a barber; when he was about 18, he followed this trade in Bol ton. In 1755 he married Patients Holt, who bore him a son before she died, and he remarried in 1761, to Margaret Biggins. He prospered until he took a public house as well as his barber shop and began to lose money. After this failure, he travelled around buying women's hair for wigs.

In the late 1760s he began spinning experiments at Preston. It is not clear how much Arkwright copied earlier inventions or was helped by Thomas Highs and John Kay but in 1768 he left Preston for Nottingham, where, with John Smalley and David Thornley as partners, he took out his first patent. They set up a mill worked by a horse where machine-spun yarn was produced successfully. The essential part of this process lay in drawing out the cotton by rollers before it was twisted by a flyer and wound onto the bobbin. The partners' resources were not sufficient for developing their patent so Arkwright found new partners in Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt, hosiers of Nottingham and Derby. Much experiment was necessary before they produced satisfactory yarn, and in 1771 a water-driven mill was built at Cromford, where the spinning process was perfected (hence the name "waterframe" was given to his spinning machine); some of this first yarn was used in the hosiery trade. Sales of all-cotton cloth were initially limited because of the high tax on calicoes, but the tax was lowered in 1774 by Act of Parliament, marking the beginning of the phenomenal growth of the cotton industry. In the evidence for this Act, Arkwright claimed that he had spent £12,000 on his machine. Once Arkwright had solved the problem of mechanical spinning, a bottleneck in the preliminary stages would have formed but for another patent taken out in 1775. This covered all preparatory processing, including some ideas not invented by Arkwright, with the result that it was disputed in 1783 and finally annulled in 1785. It contained the "crank and comb" for removing the cotton web off carding engines which was developed at Cromford and solved the difficulty in carding. By this patent, Arkwright had mechanized all the preparatory and spinning processes, and he began to establish water-powered cotton mills even as far away as Scotland. His success encouraged many others to copy him, so he had great difficulty in enforcing his patent Need died in 1781 and the partnership with Strutt ended soon after. Arkwright became very rich and financed other spinning ventures beyond his immediate control, such as that with Samuel Oldknow. It was estimated that 30,000 people were employed in 1785 in establishments using Arkwright's patents. In 1786 he received a knighthood for delivering an address of thanks when an attempt to assassinate George III failed, and the following year he became High Sheriff of Derbyshire. He purchased the manor of Cromford, where he died in 1792.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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A loom on which more than one ribbon could be woven at once may have been invented by Anton Möller at Danzig in 1586. It arrived in England from the Low Countries and was being used in London by 1616 and in Lancashire by 1680. Means were being devised in Switzerland c.1730 for driving these looms by power, but this was prohibited because it was feared that these looms would deprive other weavers of work. In England, a patent was taken out by John Kay of Bury and John Stell of Keighley in 1745 for improvements to these looms and it is probably that Gartside received permission to use this invention. In Manchester, Gartside set up a mill with swivel looms driven by a water-wheel; this was probably prior to 1758, because a man was brought up at the Lancaster Assizes in March of that year for threatening to burn down "the Engine House of Mr. Gartside in Manchester, Merchant". He set up his factory near Garrett Hall on the south side of Manchester and it may still have been running in 1764. However, the enterprise failed because it was necessary for each loom to be attended by one person in order to prevent any mishap occurring, and therefore it was more economic to use hand-frames, which the operatives could control more easily.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology, Textiles

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Edmund Cartwright, the fourth son of William Cartwright, was educated at Wakefield Grammar School, and went to University College, Oxford, at the age of 14. By special act of convocation in 1764, he was elected Fellow of Magdalen College. He married Alice Whitaker in 1772 and soon after was given the ecclesiastical living of Brampton in Derbyshire. In 1779 he was presented with the living of Goadby, Marwood, Leicestershire, where he wrote poems, reviewed new works, and began agricultural experiments. A visit to Matlock in the summer of 1784 introduced him to the inventions of Richard Arkwright and he asked why weaving could not be mechanized in a similar manner to spinning. This began a remarkable career of inventions.

Cartwright returned home and built a loom which required two strong men to operate it. This was the first attempt in England to develop a power loom. It had a vertical warp, the reed fell with the weight of at least half a hundredweight and, to quote Gartwright's own words, "the springs which threw the shuttle were strong enough to throw a Congreive [sic] rocket" (Strickland 19.71:8—for background to the "rocket" comparison, see Congreve, Sir William). Nevertheless, it had the same three basics of weaving that still remain today in modern power looms: shedding or dividing the warp; picking or projecting the shuttle with the weft; and beating that pick of weft into place with a reed. This loom he proudly patented in 1785, and then he went to look at hand looms and was surprised to see how simply they operated. Further improvements to his own loom, covered by two more patents in 1786 and 1787, produced a machine with the more conventional horizontal layout that showed promise; however, the Manchester merchants whom he visited were not interested. He patented more improvements in 1788 as a result of the experience gained in 1786 through establishing a factory at Doncaster with power looms worked by a bull that were the ancestors of modern ones. Twenty-four looms driven by steam-power were installed in Manchester in 1791, but the mill was burned down and no one repeated the experiment. The Doncaster mill was sold in 1793, Cartwright having lost £30,000, However, in 1809 Parliament voted him £10,000 because his looms were then coming into general use.

In 1789 he began working on a wool-combing machine which he patented in 1790, with further improvements in 1792. This seems to have been the earliest instance of mechanized combing. It used a circular revolving comb from which the long fibres or "top" were. carried off into a can, and a smaller cylinder-comb for teasing out short fibres or "noils", which were taken off by hand. Its output equalled that of twenty hand combers, but it was only relatively successful. It was employed in various Leicestershire and Yorkshire mills, but infringements were frequent and costly to resist. The patent was prolonged for fourteen years after 1801, but even then Cartwright did not make any profit. His 1792 patent also included a machine to make ropes with the outstanding and basic invention of the "cordelier" which he communicated to his friends, including Robert Fulton, but again it brought little financial benefit. As a result of these problems and the lack of remuneration for his inventions, Cartwright moved to London in 1796 and for a time lived in a house built with geometrical bricks of his own design.

Other inventions followed fast, including a tread-wheel for cranes, metallic packing for pistons in steam-engines, and bread-making and brick-making machines, to mention but a few. He had already returned to agricultural improvements and he put forward suggestions in 1793 for a reaping machine. In 1801 he received a prize from the Board of Agriculture for an essay on husbandry, which was followed in 1803 by a silver medal for the invention of a three-furrow plough and in 1805 by a gold medal for his essay on manures. From 1801 to 1807 he ran an experimental farm on the Duke of Bedford's estates at Woburn.

From 1786 until his death he was a prebendary of Lincoln. In about 1810 he bought a small farm at Hollanden near Sevenoaks, Kent, where he continued his inventions, both agricultural and general. Inventing to the last, he died at Hastings and was buried in Battle church.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Jacquard was apprenticed at the age of 12 to bookbinding, and later to type-founding and cutlery. His parents, who had some connection with weaving, left him a small property upon their death. He made some experiments with pattern weaving, but lost all his inheritance; after marrying, he returned to type-founding and cutlery. In 1790 he formed the idea for his machine, but it was forgotten amidst the excitement of the French Revolution, in which he fought for the Revolutionists at the defence of Lyons. The machine he completed in 1801 combined earlier inventions and was for weaving net. He was sent to Paris to demonstrate it at the National Exposition and received a bronze medal. In 1804 Napoleon granted him a patent, a pension of 1,500 francs and a premium on each machine sold. This enabled him to study and work at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers to perfect his mechanism for pattern weaving. A method of selecting any combination of leashes at each shoot of the weft had to be developed, and Jacquard's mechanism was the outcome of various previous inventions. By taking the cards invented by Falcon in 1728 that were punched with holes like the paper of Bouchon in 1725, to select the needles for each pick, and by placing the apparatus above the loom where Vaucanson had put his mechanism, Jacquard combined the best features of earlier inventions. He was not entirely successful because his invention failed in the way it pressed the card against the needles; later modifications by Breton in 1815 and Skola in 1819 were needed before it functioned reliably. However, the advantage of Jacquard's machine was that each pick could be selected much more quickly than on the earlier draw looms, which meant that John Kay's flying shuttle could be introduced on fine pattern looms because the weaver no longer had to wait for the drawboy to sort out the leashes for the next pick. Robert Kay's drop box could also be used with different coloured wefts. The drawboy could be dispensed with because the foot-pedal operating the Jacquard mechanism could be worked by the weaver. Patterns could be changed quickly by replacing one set of cards with another, but the scope of the pattern was more limited than with the draw loom. Some machines that were brought into use aroused bitter hostility. Jacquard suffered physical violence, barely escaping with his life, and his machines were burnt by weavers at Lyons. However, by 1812 his mechanism began to be generally accepted and had been applied to 11,000 draw-looms in France. In 1819 Jacquard received a gold medal and a Cross of Honour for his invention. His machines reached England c.1816 and still remain the basic way of weaving complicated patterns.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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At the beginning of the eighteenth century, silk weaving was one of the most prosperous trades in Britain, but it depended upon raw silk worked up on hand twisting or throwing machines. In 1702 Thomas Cotchett set up a mill for twisting silk by water-power at the northern end of an island in the river Derwent at Derby; this would probably have been to produce organzine, the hard twisted thread used for the warp when weaving silk fabrics. Such mills had been established in Italy beginning with the earliest in Bologna in 1272, but it would appear that Cotchett used Dutch silk-throwing machinery that was driven by a water wheel that was 13½ ft (4.1 m) in diameter and built by the local engineer, George Sorocold. The enterprise soon failed, but it was quickly revived and extended by Thomas and John Lombe with machinery based on that being used successfully in Italy.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Little is known about the early life of Robert Kay except that he may have moved to France with his father, John Kay of Bury in 1747 but must have returned to England and their home town of Bury soon after. He may have been involved with his father in the production of a machine for making the wire covering for hand cards to prepare cotton for spinning. However, John Aikin, writing in 1795, implies that this was a recent invention. Kay's machine could pierce the holes in the leather backing, cut off a length of wire, bend it and insert it through the holes, row after row, in one operation by a person turning a shaft. The machine preserved in the Science Museum, in London's South Kensington, is more likely to be one of Robert's machine than his father's, for Robert carried on business as a cardmaker in Bury from 1791 until his death in 1801. The flying shuttle, invented by his father, does not seem to have been much used by weavers of cotton until Robert invented the drop box in 1760. Instead of a single box at the end of the sley, Robert usually put two, but sometimes three or four, one above another; the boxes could be raised or lowered. Shuttles with either different colours or different types of weft could be put in the boxes and the weaver could select any one by manipulating levers with the left hand while working the picking stick with the right to drive the appropriate shuttle across the loom. Since the selection could be made without the weaver having to pick up a shuttle and place it in the lath, this invention helped to speed up weaving, especially of multi-coloured checks, which formed a large part of the Lancashire output.

Between 1760 and 1763 Robert Kay may have written a pamphlet describing the invention of the flying shuttle and the attack on his father, pointing out how much his father had suffered and that there had been no redress. In February 1764 he brought to the notice of the Society of Arts an improvement he had made to the flying shuttle by substituting brass for wood, which enabled a larger spool to be carried.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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John Smalley of Preston was the second son of John, a chapman of Blackburn. He was a distant relative of Richard Arkwright through marrying, in 1751, Elizabeth Baxter, whose mother Ellen was the widow of Arkwright's uncle, Richard. In the Preston Guild Rolls of 1762 he was described as a grocer and painter, and he was also Landlord of the Bull Inn. The following year he became a bailiff of Preston and in 1765 he became a Corporation steward. On 14 May 1768 Arkwright, Smalley and David Thornley became partners in a cotton-spinning venture in Nottingham. They agreed to apply for a patent for Arkwright's invention of spinning by rollers, and Smalley signed as a witness. It is said that Smalley provided much of the capital for this new venture as he sold his business at Preston for about £1,600, but this was soon found to be insufficient and the partnership had to be enlarged to include Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt.

Smalley may have helped to establish the spinning mill at Nottingham, but by 28 February 1771 he was back in Preston, for on that day he was chosen a "Councilman in the room of Mr. Thomas Jackson deceased" (Fitton 1989:38). He attended meetings for over a year, but either in 1772 or the following year he sold the Bull Inn, and certainly by August 1774 the Smalleys were living in Cromford, where he became Manager of the mill. He soon found himself at logger-heads with Arkwright; however, Strutt was able to smooth the dispute over for a while. Things came to a head in January 1777 when Arkwright was determined to get rid of Smalley, and the three remaining partners agreed to buy out Smalley's share for the sum of £10,751.

Although he had agreed not to set up any textile machinery, Smalley moved to Holywell in North Wales, where in the spring of 1777 he built a cotton-spinning mill in the Greenfield valley. He prospered there and his son was later to build two more mills in the same valley. Smalley used to go to Wrexham to sell his yarn, and there met John Peers, a leather merchant, who was able to provide a better quality leather for covering the drawing rollers which came to be used in Lancashire. Smalley died in 1782, shortly before Arkwright could sue him for infringement of his patents.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Peter Ewart, the youngest of six sons, was born at Traquair manse, where his father was a clergyman in the Church of Scotland. He was educated at the Free School, Dumfries, and in 1782 spent a year at Edinburgh University. He followed this with an apprenticeship under John Rennie at Musselburgh before moving south in 1785 to help Rennie erect the Albion corn mill in London. This brought him into contact with Boulton \& Watt, and in 1788 he went to Birmingham to erect a waterwheel and other machinery in the Soho Manufactory. In 1789 he was sent to Manchester to install a steam engine for Peter Drinkwater and thus his long connection with the city began. In 1790 Ewart took up residence in Manchester as Boulton \& Watt's representative. Amongst other engines, he installed one for Samuel Oldknow at Stockport. In 1792 he became a partner with Oldknow in his cotton-spinning business, but because of financial difficulties he moved back to Birmingham in 1795 to help erect the machines in the new Soho Foundry. He was soon back in Manchester in partnership with Samuel Greg at Quarry Bank Mill, Styal, where he was responsible for developing the water power, installing a steam engine, and being concerned with the spinning machinery and, later, gas lighting at Greg's other mills.

In 1798, Ewart devised an automatic expansion-gear for steam engines, but steam pressures at the time were too low for such a device to be effective. His grasp of the theory of steam power is shown by his paper to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1808, On the Measure of Moving Force. In 1813 he patented a power loom to be worked by the pressure of steam or compressed air. In 1824 Charles Babbage consulted him about automatic looms. His interest in textiles continued until at least 1833, when he obtained a patent for a self-acting spinning mule, which was, however, outclassed by the more successful one invented by Richard Roberts. Ewart gave much help and advice to others. The development of the machine tools at Boulton \& Watt's Soho Foundry has been mentioned already. He also helped James Watt with his machine for copying sculptures. While he continued to run his own textile mill, Ewart was also in partnership with Charles Macintosh, the pioneer of rubber-coated cloth. He was involved with William Fairbairn concerning steam engines for the boats that Fairbairn was building in Manchester, and it was through Ewart that Eaton Hodgkinson was introduced to Fairbairn and so made the tests and calculations for the tubes for the Britannia Railway Bridge across the Menai Straits. Ewart was involved with the launching of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway as he was a director of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce at the time.

In 1835 he uprooted himself from Manchester and became the first Chief Engineer for the Royal Navy, assuming responsibility for the steamboats, which by 1837 numbered 227 in service. He set up repair facilities and planned workshops for overhauling engines at Woolwich Dockyard, the first establishment of its type. It was here that he was killed in an accident when a chain broke while he was supervising the lifting of a large boiler. Engineering was Ewart's life, and it is possible to give only a brief account of his varied interests and connections here.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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On 6 April 1789 John Austin wrote to James Watt, seeking advice about patenting "a weaving loom I have invented to go by the hand, horse, water or any other constant power, to comb, brush, or dress the yarn at the same time as it is weaving \& by which one man will do the work of three and make superior work to what can be done by the common loom" (Boulton \& Watt Collection, Birmingham, James Watt Papers, JW/22). Watt replied that "there is a Clergyman by the name of Cartwright at Doncaster who has a patent for a similar contrivance" (Boulton \& Watt Collection, Birmingham, Letter Book 1, 15 April 1789). Watt pointed out that there was a large manufactory running at Doncaster and something of the same kind at Manchester with working power looms. Presumably, this reply deterred Austin from taking out a patent. However, some members of the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce continued developing the loom, and in 1798 one that was tried at the spinning mill of J.Monteith, of Pollokshaws, near Glasgow, answered the purpose so well that a building was erected and thirty of the looms were installed. Later, in 1800, this number was increased to 200, all of which were driven by a steam engine, and it was stated that one weaver and a boy could tend from three to five of these looms.

Austin's loom was worked by eccentrics, or cams. There was one cam on each side with "a sudden beak or projection" that drove the levers connected to the picking pegs, while other cams worked the heddles and drove the reed. The loom was also fitted with a weft stop motion and could produce more cloth than a hand loom, and worked at about sixty picks per minute. The pivoting of the slay at the bottom allowed the loom to be much more compact than previous ones.

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See also: Cartwright, Revd Edmund

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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In May 1791, Richard Gorton took out a patent for a new type of power-driven loom for narrow fabrics to "work one or several pieces at the same time, either by hand, lath, steam engine, or by water-machinery". The sley with the reed was worked by a crank, and the picker by a lever and cam. The shuttle-box had springs to retain the shuttle, and the warp was kept tight by weights. A stop, which was usually pushed out of the way by the shuttle entering the box, prevented the sley or lath "driving the shuttle against the piece" when the shuttle stuck in the middle. One particularly interesting feature was the sizing of the warp threads by means of brushes and a roller that turned in a square trough filled with size. This pre-dates Radcliffe's sizing machine, which is always considered the first, by a number of years. The mill in which these machines worked was at Cuckney, near Mansfield, England. In 1788 Thomas Gorton had installed one of the earliest Boulton \& Watt rotative steam engines there.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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William Kelly, a Larnack clockmaker, was Manager of David Dale's New Lanark cotton-spinning mills. He was writing to Boulton \& Watt in 1796 about the different ways in which he heated the mills and the New Institution. He must also have been responsible for supervising the millwrights' and mechanics' shops where much of the spinning machinery for the mills was constructed. At one time there were eighty-seven men employed in these shops alone. He devised a better method of connecting the water wheel to the line shafting which he reckoned would save a quarter of the water power required. Kelly may have been the first to apply power to the mule, for in 1790 he drove the spinning sequence from the line shafting, which operated the gear mechanism to turn the rollers and spindles as well as draw out the carriage. The winding on of the newly spun yarn still had to be done by hand. Then in 1792 he applied for a patent for a self-acting mule in which all the operations would be carried out by power. However, winding the yarn on in a conical form was a problem; he tried various ways of doing this, but abandoned his attempts because the mechanism was cumbersome and brought no economic advantage as only a comparatively small number of spindles could be operated. Even so, his semi-automatic mule became quite popular and was exported to America in 1803. Kelly was replaced as Manager at New Lanark by Robert Owen in 1800.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Daniel Bourn may well have been a native of Lancashire. He set up a fourth Paul-Wyatt cotton-spinning mill at Leominster, Herefordshire, possibly in 1744, although the earliest mention of it is in 1748. His only known partner in this mill was Henry Morris, a yarn dealer who in 1743 had bought a grant of spindles from Paul at the low rate of 30 shillings or 40 shillings per spindle when the current price was £3 or £4. When Bourn patented his carding engine in 1748, he asked Wyatt for a grant of spindles, to which Wyatt agreed because £100 was offered immedi-ately. The mill, which was probably the only one outside the control of Paul and his backers, was destroyed by fire in 1754 and was not rebuilt, although Bourn and his partners had considerable hopes for it. Bourn was said to have lost over £1,600 in the venture.

Daniel Bourn described himself as a wool and cotton dealer of Leominster in his patent of 1748 for his carding engine. The significance of this invention is the use of rotating cylinders covered with wire clothing. The patent drawing shows four cylinders, one following the other to tease out the wool, but Bourn was unable to discover a satisfactory method of removing the fibres from the last cylinder. It is possible that Robert Peel in Lancashire obtained one of these engines through Morris, and that James Hargreaves tried to improve it; if so, then some of the early carding engines in the cotton industry were derived from Bourn's.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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James Hargreaves was first a carpenter and then a hand-loom weaver at Stanhill, Blackburn, probably making Blackburn Checks or Greys from linen warps and cotton weft. An invention ascribed to him doubled production in the preparatory carding process before spinning. Two or three cards were nailed to the same stock and the upper one was suspended from the ceiling by a cord and counterweight. Around 1762 Robert Peel (1750–1830) sought his assistance in constructing a carding engine with cylinders that may have originated with Daniel Bourn, but this was not successful. In 1764, inspired by seeing a spinning wheel that continued to revolve after it had been knocked over accidentally, Hargreaves invented his spinning jenny. The first jennies had horizontal wheels and could spin eight threads at once. To spin on this machine required a great deal of skill. A length of roving was passed through the clamp or clove. The left hand was used to close this and draw the roving away from the spindles which were rotated by the spinner turning the horizontal wheel with the right hand. The spindles twisted the fibres as they were being drawn out. At the end of the draw, the spindles continued to be rotated until sufficient twist had been put into the fibres to make the finished yarn. This was backed off from the tips of the spindles by reversing them and then, with the spindles turning in the spinning direction once more, the yarn was wound on by the right hand rotating the spindles, the left hand pushing the clove back towards them and one foot operating a pedal which guided the yarn onto the spindles by a faller wire. A piecer was needed to rejoin the yarns when they broke. At first Hargreaves's jenny was worked only by his family, but then he sold two or three of them, possibly to Peel. In 1768, local opposition and a riot in which his house was gutted forced him to flee to Nottingham. He entered into partnership there with Thomas James and established a cotton mill. In 1770 he followed Arkwright's example and sought to patent his machine and brought an action for infringement against some Lancashire manufacturers, who offered £3,000 in settlement. Hargreaves held out for £4,000, but he was unable to enforce his patent because he had sold jennies before leaving Lancashire. Arkwright's "water twist" was more suitable for the Nottingham hosiery industry trade than jenny yarn and in 1777 Hargreaves replaced his own machines with Arkwright's. When he died the following year, he is said to have left property valued at £7,000 and his widow received £400 for her share in the business. Once the jenny had been made public, it was quickly improved by other inventors and the number of spindles per machine increased. In 1784, there were reputed to be 20,000 jennies of 80 spindles each at work. The jenny greatly eased the shortage of cotton weft for weavers.

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SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Lewis Paul, apparently of French Huguenot extraction, was quite young when his father died. His father was Physician to Lord Shaftsbury, who acted as Lewis Paul's guardian. In 1728 Paul made a runaway match with a widow and apparently came into her property when she died a year later. He must have subsequently remarried. In 1732 he invented a pinking machine for making the edges of shrouds out of which he derived some profit.

Why Paul went to Birmingham is unknown, but he helped finance some of Wyatt's earlier inventions. Judging by the later patents taken out by Paul, it is probable that he was the one interested in spinning, turning to Wyatt for help in the construction of his spinning machine because he had no mechanical skills. The two men may have been involved in this as early as 1733, although it is more likely that they began this work in 1735. Wyatt went to London to construct a model and in 1736 helped to apply for a patent, which was granted in 1738 in the name of Paul. The patent shows that Paul and Wyatt had a number of different ways of spinning in mind, but contains no drawings of the machines. In one part there is a description of sets of rollers to draw the cotton out more finely that could have been similar to those later used by Richard Arkwright. However, it would seem that Paul and Wyatt followed the other main method described, which might be called spindle drafting, where the fibres are drawn out between the nip of a pair of rollers and the tip of the spindle; this method is unsatisfactory for continuous spinning and results in an uneven yarn.

The spinning venture was supported by Thomas Warren, a well-known Birmingham printer, Edward Cave of Gentleman's Magazine, Dr Robert James of fever-powder celebrity, Mrs Desmoulins, and others. Dr Samuel Johnson also took much interest. In 1741 a mill powered by two asses was equipped at the Upper Priory, Birmingham, with, machinery for spinning cotton being constructed by Wyatt. Licences for using the invention were sold to other people including Edward Cave, who established a mill at Northampton, so the enterprise seemed to have great promise. A spinning machine must be supplied with fibres suitably prepared, so carding machines had to be developed. Work was in hand on one in 1740 and in 1748 Paul took out another patent for two types of carding device, possibly prompted by the patent taken out by Daniel Bourn. Both of Paul's devices were worked by hand and the carded fibres were laid onto a strip of paper. The paper and fibres were then rolled up and placed in the spinning machine. In 1757 John Dyer wrote a poem entitled The Fleece, which describes a circular spinning machine of the type depicted in a patent taken out by Paul in 1758. Drawings in this patent show that this method of spinning was different from Arkwright's. Paul endeavoured to have the machine introduced into the Foundling Hospital, but his death in early 1759 stopped all further development. He was buried at Paddington on 30 April that year.

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SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Textiles

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John Wyatt was the eldest son of John and Jane Wyatt, who lived in the small village of Thickbroom in the parish of Weeford, near Lichfield. John the younger was educated at Lichfield school and then worked as a carpenter at Thickbroom till 1730. In 1732 he was in Birmingham, engaged by a man named Heely, a gunbarrel forger, who became bankrupt in 1734. Wyatt had invented a machine for making files and sought the help of Lewis Paul to manufacture this commercially.

The surviving papers of Paul and Wyatt in Birmingham are mostly undated and show a variety of machines with which they were involved. There was a machine for "making lead hard" which had rollers, and "a Gymcrak of some consequence" probably refers to a machine for boring barrels or the file-making machine. Wyatt is said to have been one of the unsuccessful competitors for the erection of London Bridge in 1736. He invented and perfected the compound-lever weighing machine. He had more success with this: after 1744, machines for weighing up to five tons were set up at Birmingham, Chester, Gloucester, Hereford, Lichfield and Liverpool. Road construction, bridge building, hydrostatics, canals, water-powered engines and many other schemes received his attention and it is said that he was employed for a time after 1744 by Matthew Boulton.

It is certain that in April 1735 Paul and Wyatt were working on their spinning machine and Wyatt was making a model of it in London in 1736, giving up his work in Birmingham. The first patent, in 1738, was taken out in the name of Lewis Paul. It is impossible to know which of these two invented what. This first patent covers a wide variety of descriptions of the vital roller drafting to draw out the fibres, and it is unknown which system was actually used. Paul's carding patent of 1748 and his second spinning patent of 1758 show that he moved away from the system and principles upon which Arkwright built his success. Wyatt and Paul's spinning machines were sufficiently promising for a mill to be set up in 1741 at the Upper Priory, Birmingham, that was powered by two asses. Wyatt was the person responsible for constructing the machinery. Edward Cave established another at Northampton powered by water while later Daniel Bourn built yet another at Leominster. Many others were interested too. The Birmingham mill did not work for long and seems to have been given up in 1743. Wyatt was imprisoned for debt in The Fleet in 1742, and when released in 1743 he tried for a time to run the Birmingham mill and possibly the Northampton one. The one at Leominster burned down in 1754, while the Northampton mill was advertised for sale in 1756. This last mill may have been used again in conjunction with the 1758 patent. It was Wyatt whom Daniel Bourn contacted about a grant for spindles for his Leominster mill in 1748, but this seems to have been Wyatt's last association with the spinning venture.

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