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Cotton mill
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A cotton mill is a factory housing spinning and weaving machinery. Cotton was a leading sector in the Industrial Revolution, as cotton spinning was mechanised in mills. During this time, the success of cotton mills gave birth to Mill towns, which became significant settlements, following the foundation of mills in them. First constructed in England, cotton mills facilitated huge and rapid economic expansion for many parts of Britain, particularly in North West England, for example Manchester, Oldham, Preston, Blackburn, Burnley, Ashton and Rochdale; and in Stockport, and other towns and cities.
on manufacture (like that of other textiles) started as a domestic industry.
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Encyclopedia
A cotton mill is a factory housing spinning and weaving machinery. Cotton was a leading sector in the Industrial Revolution, as cotton spinning was mechanised in mills. During this time, the success of cotton mills gave birth to Mill towns, which became significant settlements, following the foundation of mills in them. First constructed in England, cotton mills facilitated huge and rapid economic expansion for many parts of Britain, particularly in North West England, for example Manchester, Oldham, Preston, Blackburn, Burnley, Ashton and Rochdale; and in Stockport, and other towns and cities.
Development of the cotton mill
Cotton manufacture (like that of other textiles) started as a domestic industry. This changed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, when the output of cotton textile increased dramatically. There were many inventions leading up to the Industrial Revolution. The flying shuttle was invented in 1733 by John Kay which made weaving faster and left the weaver wanting more yarn than the spinners were making. The solution to this was new technology to speed up spinning. The mechanisation of cotton spinning involved two parallel threads of inventions.
Early cotton mills
In 1738 Lewis Paul and John Wyatt obtained a patent for a spinning machine that for the first time used the principle of two sets of rollers travelling at different speeds to enable spinning by machine. The patent outlined the two key developments that were later to underlie both Richard Arkwright's water frame and James Hargreaves' spinning jenny, and made it possible for a single power source to drive more than one spinning machine. Wyatt envisaged "a kind of mill, with wheels turned either by horses, water or wind."
Using this technology, and with financial support provided by associates of the author Samuel Johnson, Paul and Wyatt set up the first mill to spin cotton "without the aid of human fingers" at the Upper Priory in Birmingham in the summer of 1741. The mill "containing fifty rollers ... turned by two donkeys walking round an axis" was not a commercial success, with Wyatt unable to enforce the levels of organisation and discipline that an operation on this scale demanded; Andrew Ure was to comment that Wyatt was "favourably placed, in a mechanical point of view, for maturing his admirable scheme" but "a gentle and passive spirit, little qualified to cope with the hardships of a new manufacturing enterprise". Two years after its opening the mill was described as being in a "pitiful state" and in 1743 Wyatt was incarcerated in the Fleet Prison for debt. Matthew Boulton was later to observe that the Paul-Wyatt mill "would have got money had it been in good hands", but nothing is known of it after Wyatt's release in October 1743.
Four other mills were set up using the Paul-Wyatt machinery in the following years. Edward Cave – publisher of the The Gentleman's Magazine and one of the friends of Dr Johnson who had funded the development of Paul and Wyatt's invention – experimented in London with running the machinery by hand and by 1742 had set up 250 spindles in a watermill in Northampton. This was the first cotton mill to be driven by water power. Cave experienced similar problems organising his workforce to Paul and Wyatt ("I have not got half my people come to work today" he wrote to Wyatt, "and I have no great fascination in the prospect I have to put myself in the power of such people") and the mill generated little profit, but was to continue operation until about 1764. Samuel Touchet set up a second Birmingham mill in conjunction with Paul and Wyatt in 1744; little is known of its fate, but it was sufficiently encouraging for Touchet to lease the Northampton mill from Cave for a period up to 1755.
The final mill was that established by Daniel Bourn in Leominster. This may have been in operation by 1744, but is first mentioned in 1748, when both Bourn and Paul patented machinery for carding cotton - a premilinary process that must be undertaken before spinning. Bourn's mill burned down in 1754 but must have had a considerable reputation, as the Manchester Mercurys report of the fire described it as being "erected there with great expense and skill" and "viewed with great pleasure and admiration by travellers and all who had seen them"
Water frame
Both Paul and Bourne patented machinery in 1748 for carding cotton. Carding is a premilinary process that must be undertaken before spinning. Mr Morris (probably Henry Morris) set up a carding cylinder at Brock Mill near Wigan in 1763. Ralph Taylor of Royton followed this with a powered cotton mill at Thorpe Clough in 1764, reputedly the first of its kind.
The roller spinning principle of Paul and Bourne was the basis of Richard Arkwright's later water frame, patented in 1769. This invention was initially put into operation at Nottingham, where hosiery was being produced from imported Indian yarn. Arkwright set up the water powered Cromford Mill in Derbyshire in 1771. His partner Jedediah Strutt set up mills at Belper and elsewhere in the following years. Arkwright's second patent (of 1775) combined his previously patented machine with a carding machine, but when he attempted to enforce that patent, it was found not to be a new invention and hence invalid.
Many other mills followed, particularly after Arkwright's original patent expired in 1783. By 1788, there were about 210 mills in Great Britain, the counties with the greatest number being Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Derbyshire. The water frame produced a strong yarn suitable for the warp.
Spinning mule
The spinning jenny was developed by James Hargreaves in c.1764, but patented only in 1770. Like Arkwright, Hargreaves moved from Lancashire to Nottingham. The jenny was a manually operated machine, which speeded up spinning, but it was not initially powered by mills. This produced a softer yarn suitable for the weft, so that the two inventions were in a sense complementary.
The principles of both were combined by Samuel Crompton in his spinning mule, but water power was not applied to the mule until David Dale did so at New Lanark Mills in about 1792.
Consequences
These inventions facilitated a great expansion in cotton spinning and the related production of cotton cloth. Cotton was one of the leading sectors in the Industrial Revolution, and in the rise of socio-economic prosperity in England. From the 19th century cotton manufacture was concentrated in Lancashire, whereas the West Riding of Yorkshire concentrated on wool, although there was some overlap. Initially the main source of raw cotton was India during the British Raj, but later the southern United States became the main source, the cotton being imported into England through Liverpool.
United States
At the time of the American Revolution, 1775-1783, most cloth was still made at home. An Uxbridge, Massachusetts farmer by the name of Richard Mowry successfully built and marketed the equipment needed to manufacture woolen, linen or cotton cloth.
The first textile mill in the United States was built in Beverly, Massachusetts in 1787 by entrepreneur John Cabot and brothers, after being interested in the textile industry by American investors Thomas Somers and James Leonard. The three storey combination mill was horse-powered, it had 126 spindles and carding equipment and looms. The first commercially successful cotton-spinning mill with a fully mechanized water power system in the United States in 1790 by Samuel Slater on the Blackstone River in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Then, in 1814, the Boston Manufacturing Company's first "fully-integrated" mill was completed on the Charles River at Waltham, Massachusetts. One of its proprietors was Francis Cabot Lowell, who had traveled to Manchester, England to study the mill system and memorize its construction. This venture was highly successful, due to the development of the first successful power loom in America, built by Paul Moody, a skilled mechanic hired by Lowell and his associates to construct the machinery in the new mill. The methods devised by this group came to be known as the "Waltham System", which would later be duplicated at Lowell, Massachusetts and several other new cities throughout New England. Another important improvement made by Paul Moody was to power the mill machinery using a system of overhead pulleys and leather belting. This system would prove to be more efficient than the old "British" method of shafts and gearing, and required much less maintenance.
While the production of cotton cloth in the United States grew rapidly in the first half of the 19th century, the general sizes of the cotton mills built during this time were generally limited by the power of the streams they were built upon. Then, in the 1850s, George Corliss of Providence, Rhode Island would make notable improvements to the steam engine, making it highly reliable and much more suitable to power industrial machinery. Mill owners began supplementing the water power from their dams with steam engines. Soon, mills were being designed to be powered entirely by steam power. After the Civil War, the typical size of cotton mills grew very quickly and production reached record levels. This trend would continue throughout New England into the early decades of the 20th century.
In the years following the American Civil War, dozens of cotton mills sprang up along the Carolina Piedmont, where cheap labor and plentiful water power made operations profitable. Cotton could be processed into fabric where it grew, saving transportation costs. Indeed, New England mills found it increasingly difficult to compete with those in Southern States, and many went into gradual decline until finally bankrupted during the Great Depression. Cotton mills and their owners dominated the economy and politics of the Piedmont well into the twentieth century, when many textile operations moved overseas.
Processing the cotton
Cotton mills get the cotton shipped to them in large, 500 pound bales. When the cotton comes out of a bale, it is all packed together and still contains vegetable matter. In order to fluff up the cotton and remove the vegetable matter, the cotton is sent through a picker. A picker looks similar to the carding machine and the cotton gin, but is slightly different. The cotton is fed into the machine and gets beaten with a beater bar, to loosen it up. The cotton then collects on a screen and gets fed through various rollers, which serve to remove the vegetable matter.
The cotton comes off of the picking machine in large bats, and is then taken to carding machines. The carders line up the fibres nicely to make them easier to spin. The carding machine consists mainly of one big roller with smaller ones surrounding it. All of the rollers are covered in small teeth, and as the cotton progresses further on the teeth get finer (i.e. closer together). The cotton leaves the carding machine in the form of a sliver; a large rope of fibres.
Next, several slivers are combined. Each sliver will have thin and thick spots, and by combining several slivers together a more consistent size can be reached. Since combining several slivers produces a very thick rope of cotton fibres, directly after being combined the slivers are separated into rovings. These rovings are then what are used in the spinning process. Generally speaking, for machine processing a roving is about the width of a pencil.
The spinning machines take the roving, thins it and twists it, creating yarn. The roving is pulled off a bobbin and fed through some rollers, which are feeding at several different speeds.This thins the roving at a consistent rate. If the roving was not a consistent size, then this step could cause a break in the yarn, or could jam the machine. In ring spinning, yarn is twisted through the spinning of the bobbin it is rolled on. Mule spinning was used for finer yarns.
Plying is done by pulling yarn from two or more bobbins and twisting it together, in the opposite direction that that in which it was spun. Depending on the weight desired, the cotton may or may not be plied, and the number of strands twisted together varies.
After being spun and plied, the cotton thread is taken to a warping room where racks of bobbins are set up to hold the thread while it is rolled onto the warp bar of a loom. Because the thread is fine, often three of these would be combined to get the desired thread count.
When cotton mills first came into being, the next step would be to manually thread the warp through the heddles. Later on, a machine was invented for tying the new warp onto the old warp. This saves time, but means that the cloth will have the same pattern as the previous warp. If a new pattern is wanted, the warp still has to be threaded through the heddles.
At this point, the thread is woven. Depending on the era, one person could manage anywhere from 3 to 100 machines. As time progressed new mechanisms were added that stopped the loom any time something went wrong. The mechanisms checked for such things as a broken warp thread, broken weft thread, the shuttle going straight across, and if the shuttle was empty.
See also
Further reading
- A. P. Wadsworth and J. de L. Mann,
The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire 1600-1780 (1931)R. S. Fitton and A. P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights 1758-1830: a study of the early factory system (1958).S. D. Chapman, The Early Factory Masters: the transition to the factory system in the Midlands Textile Industry (Newton Abbot 1967).
External links
- - Learn about Blow room,carding,spinning, Fiber testing, Textile calculations etc
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