Weaving after the spinning breakthroughs
By the 1780s, machine spinning had made yarn plentiful in Britain. Weaving, in contrast, was still done mostly by hand, even though the flying shuttle had made the work quicker. This meant that a mill owner who could spin large quantities of cotton yarn still had to send it out to thousands of hand-loom weavers working at home. A loom driven by water or steam power looked like the obvious next step.
Cartwright’s attempt
In 1785 Edmund Cartwright, an English clergyman with no background in weaving, patented a power loom. He later said he was prompted by a conversation in which someone told him the idea was impractical. His first machines were crude, and the early version required considerable force and frequent repair. He set up a weaving mill in Doncaster, powered at first by animal strength and later by a steam engine, but the business was not a lasting success. A Manchester mill that planned to install his looms in the early 1790s is reported to have been burned down, though accounts of what happened differ.
Cartwright’s contribution is real but limited. He showed that a loom could be driven by an engine and that the motions of shedding, picking and beating could be linked. He did not deliver a design that weavers and owners could rely on.
Making it work
Many others turned the idea into a working machine over the next few decades. The main problems were practical ones.
- Dressing the warp. Warp threads rub against each other and break, so they were coated with starch-based size to strengthen them. Early power looms had to stop each time a new section of the warp needed dressing. William Radcliffe and Thomas Johnson developed a dressing machine in the 1800s that let the process be done separately, so that looms ran more continuously.
- Keeping the loom going. Horrocks of Stockport introduced stronger iron looms around 1813. Richard Roberts of Manchester made further improvements and built a reliable iron-framed power loom in the 1820s.
- Stopping on failure. When a thread broke or the shuttle jammed, a loom could damage itself. Devices that stopped the machine automatically helped, and later designs made the loom nearly self-regulating.
A single worker could then tend several power looms, since the loom did the heavy work and the worker’s task was to fix breaks and replace bobbins of weft. This meant output per person rose sharply, and owners needed fewer weavers per yard of cloth.
Water, steam and the mill
Early weaving sheds often used the same power sources as spinning mills. A waterwheel, or later a steam engine, turned a main shaft that ran along the building, and leather belts took the power to each loom from overhead line shafts. Steam made it possible to build weaving sheds in towns that had no suitable stream. Lancashire’s cotton weaving towns grew quickly on this basis, and the interplay of power, belts and looms became the standard picture of a Victorian mill. Later in the 1800s and 1900s, individual electric motors replaced the shafts and belts in many mills.
The numbers and the weavers
Widely cited estimates suggest that England had only a few thousand power looms around 1813 and over one hundred thousand by the early 1830s. These figures are approximate, but they show a rapid change. Meanwhile, the number of hand-loom weavers peaked and then fell. Hand weavers, some of whom had enjoyed relatively good wages in the late 1700s, found that the price paid for their work dropped as cheap machine-woven cloth arrived. Many tried to compete by working longer hours at lower rates, and some drifted into other work.
Several official inquiries in the 1830s and 1840s looked at the distress of the hand-loom weavers, and records show prolonged poverty in the trade. Such hardship was not caused only by machines. Wars, trade restrictions and swings in demand also affected employment, and historians debate how much weight to give each.
Protest and the Luddites
Some workers responded with collective action. The best known are the Luddites, active in 1811 to 1816 in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire. In the East Midlands, they smashed knitting frames. In Yorkshire, wool finishers resisted shearing machines. In Lancashire in 1812, crowds attacked power-loom weaving mills, including an attack on a mill in Middleton and an attack on Westhoughton, where a factory was burned. The authorities answered with troops, trials and executions, and Parliament made frame-breaking a capital offense in 1812.
It would be wrong to say that the Luddites simply hated machines. Many were skilled workers who saw owners using new equipment, unregulated apprentices and lower pay to bypass long-established trade customs. Their anger was as much about how the machines were introduced as about the machines themselves.
Legacy
By the middle of the 1800s, factory weaving was the main way of making cotton cloth in Britain, and the pattern spread to the United States, continental Europe and later Asia. The power loom helped define the working life of mill towns, with long shifts and noisy sheds, and it prompted early debate about labor laws. It also made cloth cheaper, which, combined with other industries such as ready-made clothing and sewing machines, changed what people could afford to wear.