An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology part 86 pdf

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Through the success of the first mill at Cromford, Arkwright built others in
the area and later helped to finance mills in other parts of the country. One, for
example, was at New Lanark in Scotland, which he founded in 1784 with David
Dale as his partner. Robert Owen became the manager at New Lanark in 1799
and carried out his social experiments there in the following years. Arkwright
died in 1792, a very wealthy man, one of the few textile inventors to do so. His
example was copied by many others and textile mills began to spring up all over
the country, ushering in the first phase of the Industrial Revolution.
The spinning mule
To explain the last great spinning invention of the Industrial Revolution period, it
is necessary to go back to 1779 when Samuel Crompton revealed his ‘spinning
mule’ to the public in Bolton, Lancashire. Crompton, a weaver by trade, wanted
to produce a better yarn than he could on the jenny (see p. 825) and started
work on his mule in about 1772. He combined the principles of the jenny and
the waterframe by placing his spindles on a carriage which moved away from the
drawing rollers mounted on a frame at the back. To commence spinning, the
rollers were put in gear to draw and pay out the cotton at the same time as the
plain spindles were rotated to put in twist while the carriage was moving out. No
yarn was wound on at this stage, so the cotton was suspended between the nip
of the rollers and the tips of the spindles. The cotton was only lightly twisted to
give it enough strength to stop it breaking. The rollers stopped paying out the
cotton before the carriage reached the full extent of the draw, so the yarn was
stretched on the last part of the draw, helping to even it out. Then twist was put
in to lock the fibres together. Hence the mule combined the ease of drawing out
the cotton in Arkwright’s rollers with the gentleness and quality found through
the stretching action and spinning on bare spindles. Very soon Crompton was
spinning finer yarns than any hand spinner.
With the spinning sequence finished, the yarn had to be wound on. First
the spindles had to be rotated backwards to clear the yarn from their tips and

then, with the help of a faller wire, the yarn was guided on to the spindles in
the shape of a cop, as the carriage was pushed in. When the carriage was fully
in, the faller wire was raised, so that the yarn wound itself in a loose spiral up
to the tip of the spindle and the mule was ready for the next draw.
Crompton built his first mule, which had 48 spindles, at Hall-i’-th’-Wood,
Bolton, but soon aroused the suspicions of the local people because he was
producing such fine quality yarn more cheaply than anyone else. He was
pestered to such an extent by people trying to see his machine that he finally
agreed to make it public in return for a subscription to be raised among the
local manufacturers. In view of the fortunes made from his invention by
others, the sum of £70 which was agreed was a ludicrous amount, but he
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never received even this, since only £60 was collected. His invention was
immediately taken up by others and, from then on, he had nothing to do with
further development of the mule. He did receive a grant of £5000 from
Parliament in 1812, but this fell far short of his expectations and he died in
1827 in straitened circumstances.
Other inventions
Power sources
The three great spinning inventions, by themselves, would not have been able to
alter the textile industry so dramatically if there had not been parallel
improvements in other sections to enable these to increase production too. The
enormous expansion of power-driven mills would have soon outstripped the
number of waterpowered sites, and continued growth was possible only through
an alternative source of power. Probably the first use of steam to drive a textile mill
was in 1783 at Arkwright’s mill on Shudehill in Manchester. Here the stream was
too small to drive the mill, so an atmospheric steam engine pumped the water
which had turned a waterwheel back to the upper mill pond so that it could be
used over and over again; an early example of a pumped-storage scheme.

In 1785, James Watt installed one of his first rotative steam engines to drive
directly George Robinson’s spinning mill near Papplewick, a little to the north
of Nottingham. This 7–5kw (10hp) engine was a much more efficient way of
using steam power and was the forerunner of many thousands of mill engines.
Some of the later ones generated 2250kw (3000hp) to drive spinning mills
built in the early 1900s. Like all other areas of industrial production, the textile
industry moved from waterpower through steam to electricity as they were
successively introduced (see Chapters 4, 5, and 6).
Sources of cotton
The production of all-cotton cloth rose dramatically in the 1780s after the
successful development of the Arkwright spinning system and the introduction
of the spinning mule. Soon the value of cotton goods sent for export had
exceeded that of the old-established woollen industry. The demand for raw
cotton was met by increasing the acreage of plantations, first in the West Indies
and then in the southern states of North America. Between 1790 and 1810, the
output of raw cotton from the United States rose from 680,000kg to 38.5
million kg (1 1/2 million to 85 million lb) per annum. When the Civil War
came in 1861, the American slave plantations were satisfying five-sixths of an
ever-increasing world demand; Britain took 450 million kg (1000 million lb)
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per annum, the rest of Europe about two-thirds of that amount and American
rather less than one-third.
Such a volume of cotton wool could not have left the cotton fields without Eli
Whitney’s cotton gin. In 1793 he invented a machine which used small circular
saw blades to strip the cotton off the seeds more effectively than by hand. More
important, this machine could gin a new range of short staple cotton which
could be grown far inland in parts of America where other types would not
survive. The cotton arrived in England much cleaner and so could be selected
more carefully and classified more uniformly, which led to better spinning.

Power looms
In 1784 the Revd Dr Edmund Cartwright happened to fall into conversation at
Matlock with some gentlemen from Manchester. One of them remarked that, as
soon as Arkwright’s patent had expired, so much cotton would be spun that there
would not be enough people to weave it. Cartwright replied that Arkwright must
set his wits to work to invent a weaving mill, but the Manchester gentlemen
unanimously agreed that the thing was impracticable. Cartwright decided to make
a powerloom himself and took out a patent in 1785. He described it as having ‘the
warp placed vertically, the reed fell with the weight of at least half a
hundredweight, and the springs which threw the shuttle were strong enough to
throw a Congreve rocket’. It needed two men to work it. He patented a more
conventional loom in the following year (Figure 17.10) and set up a factory at
Doncaster which failed. Slow progress was made by other people so that, by 1804,
there were about 2400 powerlooms at work in Britain (see p. 844).
Figure 17.10: Edmund Cartwright’s second power loom of 1786.
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Finishing
For centuries, the traditional way of bleaching cotton cloth had been by treating
it with buttermilk and leaving it out on the grass of bleachfields to expose it to
sunlight. The quality varied and the process would have been too slow to cope
with the increased production. In 1785 the French chemist C.L.Berthollet had
found that a strong bleaching solution was made by passing chlorine through
potash. He explained the process to James Watt who was visiting Paris. Watt
told his friend Charles Tennant, a bleacher near Glasgow, who improved the
process in 1797 by using milk of lime instead of potash. Then, in 1799, he made
a dry bleaching powder from chlorine and solid slaked lime which was much
more convenient to use. Without this bleaching powder, the cotton industry
could not have achieved its enormous expansion (see p. 833).
There were also improvements in mordants and dyes for colouring and printing

the fabrics. Printing was revolutionized for, in the place of a handblock about one
foot square with a different one for each colour, a calicoprinting machine with
rotary cylinders was invented in 1786 by a Scotsman named Bell, and was first
used at Masney near Preston. Although the copper cylinders were difficult to make
and engrave, for they were rolled from copper sheet and the soldered seams often
burst, these machines were able to increase the output of the cheaper printed calico
cloth. Rollers became the normal way of printing virtually all cloth until silk
screens started to be introduced in the 1930s. Today, roller printing has all but
disappeared and has been replaced by either flat or rotary screens. A very small
amount of hand-block printing survives for very special fabrics.
THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Preparatory machines
Little progress was made with opening machinery before 1800. Then in 1801,
Bowden tried to make a machine to copy the hand method of using sticks to
beat or batt the cotton on a table of tightly stretched cords through which the
dirt fell. For coarser cottons, the devil or willow began to come into general
use a little before 1810. It was probably invented by the Strutts of Belper and
consisted of a large spiked drum which revolved in a casing also set with
spikes. The lumps of cotton from the tightly-packed bales were carried round
by the drum and tom apart by the spikes. This opened up the cotton and
allowed some of the dirt to fall out. Machines based on the same principle have
remained in use up to the present both for opening up the bales and for tearing
apart weaving waste or rags for reprocessing.
Further cleaning and opening stages were still needed. Soon after 1800,
Snodgrass first used a scutcher at Johnston, near Paisley in Scotland, which he
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derived from the corn threshing machine. Beaters separated the cotton from
the remains of seeds and dirt. While the heavier refuse fell out and dropped
below a wire drum, the cotton was carried forward by a current of air and at

the end of the scutcher was rolled up into a broad lap. This lap might be put
through a second scutcher to clean it further before it was weighed to check it
for consistency and placed at the back of the carding engine. Scutchers and
openers have been designed in various forms, such as the Porcupine or
Creighton openers, but the basic principles remain the same today.
Carding
While carding engines have also remained basically the same, various changes
have taken place to make them more efficient. The cotton may be passed
through two carding engines, an opener and a finisher. For carding cotton, the
small wire-covered rollers above the main cylinder were replaced by flats to give
a better coverage. To save having to stop and clean these flats twice a day, in
1834, J.Smith connected them up to form an endless chain which moved slowly
over the upper part of the main cylinder. At one end were fitted cleaning
brushes. More recently, the wire type of card clothing has been replaced round
the large cylinders by metallic clothing. This is like a long length of a band-saw
wound closely round and round. It permits far higher carding speeds which are
too fast for Arkwright’s crank and comb (see p. 83), so the cotton is taken off by
a small cylinder also covered with metallic clothing.
Carding engines with rollers have remained popular for wool and cotton
waste. The rollers are set in pairs, one of which teases out the fibres and the
other, the clearer, strips them off the first roller and returns them to the main
cylinder. In the woollen industry, the carding, or rather scribbling machines as
they are called, have become massive, with three or four main cylinders in
succession. There may be a couple of sections with the wool being transferred
between them by a ‘Scotch feed’ to ensure an even distribution of the fibres.
Such machines may be up to 23m
Condenser carding and spinning
Just as carding engines have been specially designed to suit particular types
of fibres, so preparation methods differ for spinning them. In 1822,
J.Goulding of the USA, invented a method of dividing the carded web

longitudinally into individual strips by covering the doffer cylinder
alternately with card fillet and plain rings. The strips had to be lightly
twisted into slubbings to make the fibres cohere before being wound on to
bobbins. This system does not seem to have been used much in Britain until
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after 1850, when the twist was inserted by passing the strips between leather
belts or aprons which were moved from side to side as they rotated to take
the fibres off the doffer. In 1861 the tape condenser was invented by
C.Martin of Verviers in Belgium, in which the fibres were taken off the
whole surface of the doffer and then split up into strips.
This condenser strip was spun on mules specially adapted for the purpose.
The strips were wound side by side on long bobbins which were placed at the
back of the mules. Rollers paid out the fibres but did not draw them out: the
drawing, or drafting, was done by stretching. As the carriage moved out, the
spindles rotated slowly to put in just sufficient twist to make the fibres stick
together. Then the rollers stopped paying out the fibres, well before the
carriage had reached the end of its run, so that the fibres were drawn out
during the last part of the movement of the carriage. When the carriage had
reached its fullest extent, the spindles were speeded up to put in the correct
amount of twist. This became the usual way of spinning woollen yarns and a
few mules are still kept running for very high quality products. A similar
system was adapted for spinning the very short fibres of cotton waste, but
today ring frames (see p. 841) have replaced the mules. The yarn from this
industry was used for weaving flannelette sheets, dusters and dishcloths.
The self-acting mule
By 1800, two systems for cotton spinning had appeared. In one, the sliver from the
carding engine was fed into stretcher mules, or at this period in the woollen
industry into slubbing billies, in which it was converted into a thinner roving
suitable for spinning on the proper mules. A great many people made all sorts of

improvements to the mule so that by 1790, the carriages contained over 150
spindles. Great strength was required to work such a mule manually and it was a
highly skilled job to wind the cotton on to the cop evenly and with the correct
tension. Not only was there the problem of moving the carriage in at the right
speed to compensate for the varying diameters of the cone-shaped cop itself, but
the spindle tapered, so the amount of yarn wound on for each revolution
decreased as the cop was built up. The addition of a counter faller helped the mule
spinner to keep an even tension, but, even with this, building up a properly shaped
cop which would unwind without snarls in the shuttle required much practice.
It was obviously desirable to work the mule by power so that one spinner
could manage more spindles. In 1790, William Kelly of New Lanark was able
to drive the spinning sequences by power but failed with winding on. Mules on
which the carriage was drawn out, and the rollers and spindles turned, by
power soon became standard, but the spinner still had to wind on by hand. He
worked a pair of machines, so that while one was drawing out, he was winding
on the other. Piecers, often small children, were employed to join the broken
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ends and to keep the mules clean. By 1800 the size of these semi-powered
mules had increased to around 400 spindles.
During a strike of mule spinners in 1825, some millowners approached
Richard Roberts in Manchester to see if he could find a way of making the
mule self-acting. He finally solved the problem of winding on in 1830 with his
quadrant. He realized that there was always the same length of yarn to be
wound on after each draw, so he made the movement of the carriage turn the
spindles. The number of turns given to the spindles was varied by moving one
end of the winding chain up or down the quadrant lever. The quadrant was
further refined with self-adjusting mechanisms worked by the counter faller
wire to compensate for the taper of the spindle. Later, nosing motions were
fitted for spinning very fine counts. Roberts also introduced the camshaft,

which changed the belt drives and brought the various clutches in and out of
gear. See Figure 17.11 for a diagram of this machine.
The self-acting mule developed into one of the most intricate machines ever
devised. Some mules spun the finest yarns ever produced and other variants
spun the coarsest. There were mules for very short staple condenser waste cotton
yarns and others for the long fibres of worsteds. Eventually, some medium
counts cotton mules were about 40m (130ft) long with over 1000 spindles. These
were the basis of the prosperity of the Lancashire industry, for they could spin a
higher quality yarn than anything else. The last of these mules ceased operation
in 1974 and few are left except in museums, because they are too slow for
modern production and have to be attended by highly skilled operators.
Figure 17.11: The principle parts of the self-acting spinning mule.
Drawing by Richard Hills.
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The roving frame
Where waterframes were used for spinning, Arkwright’s revolving can frames
began to be replaced with roving frames soon after 1800. On these, the sliver
was drawn out through a set of rollers and a flyer put in the twist before the
roving was wound on to a bobbin. Because the friction of the bobbin caused
the fragile roving to break, both the bobbin and the spindle were driven
through gearing. The roving had to be wound on to the bobbin at the same
speed all the time even though the diameter, and hence the circumference, was
increasing as it was filled. As the rollers paid out at the same rate all the time,
the speed of the bobbin, but not the flyer, had to decrease in the same ratio as
the increasing diameter, or the rovings would have become thinner and thinner
as the bobbin was filled.
Arkwright had drawn a picture in his 1775 patent of a belt being moved
along a coned pulley to give a speed difference. A better solution, which
appeared soon after 1800, was the use of a pair of coned pulleys, facing in

opposite directions, which saved having to retension the belt. But even this
system had problems through the belt slipping owing to the power needed to
drive all the bobbins. This was solved by the introduction of the differential
drive which meant that the belt had to provide only the difference between the
flyer and bobbin speeds. A.Arnold patented this in America in 1822 and
H.Houldsworth followed in England in 1826. It was found that with double-
flanged bobbins, the rovings tended to stick against the flanges and break as
they were unwound. Therefore, around 1840, the rovings were wound on to
tubes in parallel layers, but each layer was shorter than the last, giving a
double-coned effect tapering towards the ends.
As quality improved, roving frames gradually replaced the stretcher mules,
and they are still used today to prepare the cotton. Flyer frames based on the
same principles were developed for preparing the longer fibres of flax and wool
for worsted. Such has been the improvement in these machines, through better
engineering combined with improvements in carding, that whereas there would
have been at least three in a Victorian mill, a ‘slubber’ supplying an
‘intermediate’ supplying a roving frame, today there is only one.
Combing
To prepare worsted yarns for spinning combing has always been necessary.
Not only are the wool fibres untangled and straightened, but the short ones are
deliberately removed. Those fibres that are left are more uniform in length, so
they can be spun into a finer yarn with a more silky appearance. In 1792,
Edmund Cartwright (see p. 834) patented a combing machine which was
nicknamed ‘Big Ben’, because its action resembled the punching movements of
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a local prizefighter. It found a certain amount of favour, but, in spite of
attempts by many other people, there was no really satisfactory combing
machine in Britain until the 1850s.
In 1846, J.Heilmann, of Mulhouse in France, took out a British patent for a

machine to comb cotton. Only a very basic idea can be given of this complex
machine. The fibres were first made into a narrow lap (about 30cm (12in)
wide) which was fed into rollers turned intermittently. They presented a short
section of the lap to nippers and then stopped. The section beyond the nippers
was combed to take out the short fibres. Those remaining were released by the
nippers and further rollers joined them on to those that had been already
combed. Then the first rollers turned once more to present another batch of
fibres. Combing cotton enabled spinners to produce finer, smoother and more
lustrous yarns. Later the Heilmann was replaced by the Nasmyth comber. The
waste, or short fibres, from these machines was used in the condenser spinning
industry (see p. 836).
Meanwhile, G.E.Donisthorpe of Leeds had obtained combing patents in
1842 and 1843. He joined forces with S.C.Lister and more patents were taken
out up to 1852. However, Heilmann successfully claimed that these infringed
his patent and Lister was able to exploit his own patents only by buying up
Heilmann’s rights. The Lister comb was a circular machine, suitable for wool,
and worked on a different principle except that, at one stage, the fibres were
held by nippers. James Noble patented another circular combing machine in
1853, again for wool. Three years later, Isaac Holden patented yet another
circular machine which used a ‘square motion’ comb for removing the short
fibres. Each machine had its own characteristics which rendered it suitable for
particular types of wool. The short fibres, or noils, are an important raw
material for the woollen industry. The combed sliver containing the long fibres
is wound into a ball called a top ready for drawing and spinning.
Gill boxes and Casablanca spinning systems
For drafting long fibres, the rollers have to be spaced apart a distance
corresponding to the longest fibre length. Therefore there will be a large gap
between them where the fibres are unsupported, and if there is much variation in
length, the drafting will be unequal. In 1834, P.Fairbairn patented an arrangement
consisting of a revolving tube placed between the sets of rollers through which the

fibres passed to be given a false twist. The better solution, however, lay in the
development of a much earlier patent obtained by A. Thompson of London in
1801 for hackling flax. The flax passed through a series of vertical pins mounted
on a continuous belt which was slowly rotated as the fibres were drawn through.
The longer fibres were pulled through the pins and straightened by the drawing
rollers at the front while the shorter ones were held steady by the pins and
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presented later to the rollers. Many variations of the gill boxes were developed for
spinning worsted, linen, jute and other long fibres.
In 1912, Fernando Casablanca patented in Spain his high draft system for
fibres of medium length. This consists of two aprons round the middle pair of
rollers which reach almost to the front ones. The aprons lightly press the fibres
together in the drafting zone and yet allow the quicker rotating front rollers to
pull fibres out of the aprons quite easily. This enables the slivers or rovings to be
reduced in thickness more quickly and evenly. The Saco-Lowell-Uster
Versamatic Automatic Draft Control, introduced to the drawing frame in 1953,
checked the evenness of the sliver and adjusted the speed of the rollers to
compensate for any variations. This, coupled with the Casablanca systems, has
enabled the sliver to be first made and then drawn out more evenly so that the
intermediate roving frames are no longer necessary. In fact, the Japanese have
manufactured a ring frame capable of spinning directly from the drawn sliver.
The throstle and ring frames
Development continued of the principle of spinning used on the waterframe. Soon
after 1800, the waterframe, which had been made principally from wood with brass
gears driving groups of four spindles and rollers, was replaced by the throstle. This
had cast-iron framing and cast-iron gears which were so strong that only one set was
needed at the end of the machine to drive all the rollers and spindles. The flyers,
bobbins and rollers remained unaltered. While Arkwright himself was unsuccessful
in spinning worsted, his waterframes were adapted for this in the 1790s at mills such

as Dolphinholme near Lancaster or Davison & Hawksley’s near Nottingham.
Matthew Murray in Leeds was also using them to spin flax in the 1790s.
Around 1830, a new type of spinning machine began to make its appearance
in America but did not really begin to penetrate the English mills until after
1870. On the ring frame, the drawing rollers remained the same but the flyer was
replaced by a tiny traveller which slides round a ring. The bobbin was replaced
by a tube held by friction on the spindle. The rotation of the spindle and tube
twisted the fibres as they left the nip of the rollers and the winding on was
caused by the yarn passing through the traveller at the side of the tube. The
weight of the traveller and its friction on the ring caused it to drag behind the
speed of the spindle and so the yarn was wound on. The rail holding the rings
moved up and down to guide the cotton on to the tube in a cop build.
At first, only coarse counts could be spun on ring frames. Gradually,
however, through better preparation of the roving, and higher precision and
better design in the manufacture of the frames themselves, the ring frame
became able to spin both finer and coarser and softer yarns and so slowly
ousted the mule. With the adaptation of various systems of fibre control
between the rollers, such as gill boxes or the Casablanca systems (see above),