The first cotton-spinning mill was built in 1771 in
Cromford, right
in the middle of England. This mill heralded the start of the industrial revolution. The
father of the factory system was Richard Arkwright.
Arkwright was born on 23 December 1732. He was sent off as a teenager
to be apprenticed to a hairdresser. He became a hairdresser himself, and a maker of wigs,
or perukes.
About 1767, he began to build a machine with friends to spin
cotton. They rented a room in a secluded teacher's house behind some gooseberry bushes,
but they were so secretive that the neighbours were suspicious and accused them of
sorcery, and two old women complained that the humming noises they heard at night must be
the devil tuning his bagpipes.
So Richard Arkwright moved over the hills to Nottingham, and designed
a big machine to be driven by five or six horses. He borrowed money and built a huge
``manufactory,'' to house dozens of machines and hundreds of people.
He probably borrowed the idea from Matthew Boulton. In 1762 Boulton
had gathered together a whole collection of small businesses and put them together in one
complex in Soho in Birmingham; he called it the Soho Manufactory.
Arkwright planned the whole thing from the ground up, and employed
unskilled workers to operate the machines that he had designed and built. He leased the
land in August 1771 and the mill was finished before the end of the year. The building was
five floors high, and three of them still stand.
He rented a little piece of land, took the brook under the factory,
and put a water wheel on the end of the building. Then he brought the sough down the other
side of the factory, with another waterwheel. The waterwheels have gone, but you can still
see the massive stones where the bearings were, and a mark where the stones have been
scraped by the wheel going round.
To begin with he used undershot wheels, with the stream flowing
underneath and the wheels just hanging in it, but then he heard about John Smeaton's
pioneering experiments, which proved that overshot wheels are much more efficient. So
Arkwright raised the levels both of the sough and of the brook so that his wheels could be
overshot. That gave him enough power to run the entire mill. Five floors of water power.
The conventional way to spin cotton was to start with raw imported
cotton, straight from Egypt or somewhere. First, card it; this gets rid of some of the
seeds and other grot, and straightens out the fibres a bit. The cotton is then teased out
into a long thin sliver, and then further into ``roving.'' This has just a suspicion of a
twist in it, but it
is extremely weak. The critical process comes next, the actual spinning, which converts
the thick weak roving to strong thin thread.
The problem in 1770 was that one person can spin only one thread at a
time. You need half a dozen spinners to keep one weaver busy, and the demand for cloth was
going up. That's why a spinning machine seemed like a good idea. The spinning jenny had
already been invented, but that was essentially a mechanical version of the hand-spinning
technique, and it needed not only hand power but also a highly skilled operator.
Arkwright analysed the spinner's action, and realised that two things
are going on. First you have to stretch out the roving, and second you have to twist the
thread. Several spinning machines were designed at about this time, but most of them tried
to do the stretching and the spinning together. The problem is that the moment you start
twisting the roving you lock the fibres together.
What you must do is first pull them gently out, so the thread gets
longer, and then twist it to lock the fibres together and give it strength. If you twist
it first and then try to lengthen it the fibres lock up and break. Arkwright's idea
was to stretch first and then twist. The roving passed from a bobbin between a pair of
rollers, and then a
couple of inches later between another pair that were rotating at twice the speed. The
result was to stretch the roving to twice its original length. A third pair of rollers
repeated the process. Arkwright's original machine had four sets of rollers. Later ones
had three. They increased the length of the cotton yarn by a factor of four.
He discovered that a critical feature was the distance between the
rollers; it had to be between one and three inches. The best cotton fibres were about an
inch long. The rollers had to be more than an inch apart, because if they were less then
they would snap the fibres. The machine was called a water frame
because it was powered by a water wheel. There is still one Arkwright water frame, at the
Helmshore Museum, and a quarter of it works, powered by electricity, since they don't yet
have a working water wheel.
There are 32 bobbins along each side of each end of the water
frame---128 on the whole machine. Second, it is so automatic that even I could operate it.
A conventional spinning wheel needs one skilled operator to spin one thread. The spinning
jenny could spin say a dozen threads, but needed a highly skilled operator. Arkwright's
water frame needed no skill, and spun 128 threads at a time. Arkwright was well on the way
to mass-production.
There were really two separate parts of Arkwright's brilliance. First
was the machine that turned what had been a slow and skilled operation into
childsplay.
Second was to get children to do it.
Not only did he build a huge mill, but he also built houses for his
workers in the village. He transformed Cromford from a scattered community of lead-mining
families into a tightly-knit village. He advertised for weavers with large families. Then
he gave them houses with a weaving shed on the top floor, where his cotton could be woven,
and he took the mothers and children to work in the mill.
The kids came in at the age of about ten. They worked from six in the
morning until seven at night, with half an hour off for breakfast and 40 minutes for
dinner. They got their education in the church on Sundays. The factory inspectors who came
round said he treated the kids well, though in one report they said ``the privies were too
offensive to be approached by us!'' The mills worked for 23 hours a day, and John Byng
said ``when they are lighted up, on a dark night, look most luminously beautiful.''
Arkwright's mill was essentially the first factory of this kind in
the world. Never before had people been put to work in such a well-organized way. Never
had people been told to come in at a fixed time in the morning, and work all day at a
prescribed task. His factories became the model for factories all over the country and all
over the world. This was the way to build a factory. And he himself usually followed the
same pattern---stone buildings 30 feet wide, 100 feet long, or longer if there was room,
and five, six, or seven floors high.
He built houses for the workers, and a chapel, and he built himself
first a house and later a castle, about which John Byng wrote ``it is really, within, an
effort of inconvenient ill-taste.'' Arkwright himself, one-time hairdresser, one-time pub
landlord, was, according to Carlyle, ``a plain, almost gross, bag-cheeked, pot-bellied
Lancashire man ... of copious free digestion,'' which I think meant that he farted a lot.
Yet he was knighted, and became High Sheriff of Derbyshire.
He was bright enough to invent a spinning machine. He had the vision
to see that he could make lots of money by
mass-production, even though no one had ever done that before. And he was a brilliant
manager; he was exceptionally skilful at persuading people to work for long hours in
difficult conditions.
He built his first mill when he was nearing 40, in 1771. In the next
20 years he built mills all over Derbyshire, Lancashire, and Scotland, and they were not
only cotton spinners but money spinners too, for when he died on 3 August 1792 he left
half a million, equivalent today to perhaps 200 million pounds.
