Cotton mill
[4] The mechanisation of the spinning process in the early factories was instrumental in the growth of the machine tool industry, enabling the construction of larger cotton mills.
Mills generated employment demand, drawing workers from largely rural areas and expanding urban populations.
[11] The first cotton mills were established in the 1740s to house roller spinning machinery invented by Lewis Paul and John Wyatt.
[18] They were driven by a single non-human power source which allowed the use of larger machinery and made it possible to concentrate production into organised factories.
[34] Arkwright recruited large, highly disciplined workforces for his mills, managed credit and supplies and cultivated mass consumer markets for his products.
[37] He licensed his technology to other entrepreneurs[38] and in 1782 boasted that his machinery was being used by "numbers of adventurers residing in the different counties of Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Worcester, Stafford, York, Hertford and Lancashire"[39] and by 1788 there were 143 Arkwright-type mills nationwide.
[47] In 1781 James Watt registered a patent for the first rotative steam engine designed to "give motion to the wheels of mills or other machines".
[50] Boulton and Watt's engines enabled mills to be built in urban contexts and transformed the economy of Manchester, whose importance had previously been as a centre of pre-industrial spinning and weaving[51] based on the domestic system.
Murrays' Mills alongside the Rochdale Canal, in Ancoats were powered by 40 hp Boulton and Watt beam engines.
[citation needed] Boilers were of the wagon type; chimneys were square or rectangular, attached to the mill, and in some cases part of the stair column.
The development of mills to mechanise the weaving process was more gradual partly because of the success of John Kay's 1733 invention of the flying shuttle, which increased the productivity of domestic hand loom weavers.
[58] A further attempt to mechanise the weaving process took place at Garrett Hall in Manchester in 1750 but was unsuccessful in enabling one worker to operate more than a single loom.
[62] In the United States, the early horse-powered Beverly Cotton Manufactory was designed by Thomas Somers, who started construction and testing of the facility in 1787, finishing the factory's equipment in 1788.
Experience from this factory led Moses Brown of Providence to request the assistance of a person skilled in water-powered spinning.
Slater evaded restrictions on emigration put in place to allow England to maintain its monopoly on cotton mills.
In 1814 the Boston Manufacturing Company of New England established a "fully integrated" mill on the Charles River at Waltham, Massachusetts.
Despite the ban on exporting technology from the UK, one of its proprietors, Francis Cabot Lowell, had travelled to Manchester to study the mill system and memorised some of its details.
New England mills found it increasingly difficult to compete, and as in Lancashire, went into gradual decline until bankrupted during the Great Depression.
One point of view in the 1880s was that vertically integrating the weaving sheds into new mills would reduce costs and lead to greater profits.
The British government, starved of raw cotton, established mills in south Asia exporting the spinning technology – which was copied, and became a low-labour cost competitor.
[95] Robert Owen who had worked for Peter Drinkwater in Manchester, developed the mills at New Lanark built by his father-in-law, David Dale under licence from Arkwright.
Fireproofing took the form of cast iron columns and beams from which sprang jack arches that were infilled with ash or sand and covered with stone flags or floorboards.
In Manchester extensive testing of cast iron as a structural material was carried out by Eaton Hodgkinson and William Fairbairn in the early 1820s.
Rolled steel beams and reinforced concrete flooring was introduced in a limited way in the 1880s but not widely adopted in Lancashire mills until the 20th century.
In 1781 James Watt marketed a rotary-motion steam engine that could be adapted to drive all sorts of machinery, Richard Arkwright pioneered its use in his cotton mills.
Minerva Mill, Ashton-under-Lyne was designed by P. S. Stott and equipped by John Hetherington and Son, it produced 40's twists and 65 wefts.
Mill owners made contracts with the guardians in London and the southern counties to supply them paupers, in batches of 50 or more, to be apprenticed.
As well as the usual report of hands and fingers getting severed by the machinery and insufferable heat, the dust inhaled caused a fatal condition known as brown lung.
[116] Child labour stopped here not only because of new laws but the change in the type of machinery caused by the Great Depression, which required greater height and skill.
Open sewers and shared privies led to diseases such as cholera; Manchester was hit by an epidemic in 1831 that claimed hundreds of lives.
