At Home - Bill Bryson [211]
The sudden surge of Indian cotton pleased consumers, but not manufacturers. Unable to compete with this wonder fabric, European textile workers bayed for protection almost everywhere, and almost everywhere they received it. The importation of finished cotton fabrics was banned in much of Europe throughout the eighteenth century. Raw cotton could be imported, which provided a powerful incentive to the British cloth industry to exploit it. The problem was, cotton was very hard to spin and weave. The solution to that problem is called the Industrial Revolution.
Turning bales of fluffy cotton into useful products like bedsheets and blue jeans involves two fundamental operations: spinning and weaving. Spinning is the process by which short lengths of cotton fiber become long threads; the spinner adds short fibers a little at a time and gives them a twist—the very process mentioned with string. Weaving involves interlacing two sets of strings at right angles to form a mesh. The machine on which cloth was woven was a loom. All that a loom does is hold one set of strings tight so that a second set can be fed through the first to make a weave. The tight set of strings is called the warp. The second, “active” set is called the weft—which is simply an old form of the verb weave. Most everyday household cloths—sheets, handkerchiefs, and the like—are still made from this basic, straightforward type of weaving.
Spinning and weaving were cottage industries that supported large numbers of people. Traditionally, women spun and men wove. Spinning, however, took a lot longer than weaving, and the disparity grew even worse after 1733 when John Kay, a young man from Lancashire, invented the flying shuttle—the first of the breakthrough innovations that the industry required. Kay’s mobile shuttle doubled the speed at which weaving could be performed. Spinners, already unable to keep up, fell ever more hopelessly behind, so problems developed all along the supply line, with enormous economic stresses for all concerned.
According to the story as traditionally recounted, weavers and spinners alike grew so furious with Kay that they attacked his home and he had to flee to France, where he died a pauper. The story is repeated in most histories even now with “dogmatic fervour,” in the words of the industrial historian Peter Willis, but in fact, Willis insists, there is no truth in it at all. Kay did die poor, but only because he didn’t manage his life very well. He proposed to manufacture the machines himself and rent them out to mill owners, but he set the rental so high that no one would pay it. Instead his device was widely pirated, and he spent all his funds unsuccessfully fighting for compensation through the courts. Eventually, he went to France, hoping—vainly—to find more success there. He lived almost another fifty years after his invention. He was never attacked or driven away.
A generation would pass before anyone devised a solution to the spinning problem, and it came from an unexpected quarter. In 1764, an illiterate weaver from Lancashire named James Hargreaves devised an ingeniously simple device known as the spinning jenny, which did the work of ten spinners by incorporating multiple spindles. Not much is known about Hargreaves beyond that he was born and grew up in Lancashire, married young, and had twelve children. There is no known likeness. He was the poorest and unluckiest of all the major figures of the early Industrial Revolution. Unlike Kay, Hargreaves really did experience trouble. A mob of angry locals came to his house and burned twenty half-finished jennies and most of his tools—a cruel and desperate loss to a poor man—and so for a prudent period he stopped making jennies and went into bookkeeping. The jenny, incidentally, was not named after his daughter, as is often stated; jenny was a northern word for engine.
Hargreaves’s machine doesn’t look like much in illustrations—it was essentially just ten bobbins on a frame, with a wheel to make them rotate—but it transformed