Industrial Revolution
Last Updated      12/29/2009     12/28/2009     1/12/2008      1/10/2008      1/7/2008

The Textile Industry
The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain's textile industry.


Domestic System
1600s-early 1700s, cloth was made by the domestic system.
Most of the work was done in the cottages of the workers.
Whole families worked together.
Merchants delivered raw wool and cotton to the cottages.
The workers used hand-powered spinning wheels and looms.
They would spin the thread and weave wool and cotton cloth.

The merchant would then pick up the finished cloth to sell.
The domestic system could not keep up with the demand.


Inventions


Flying Shuttle
1733, John Kay invents the flying shuttle.
A worker could weave cloth in one-half the time.
Spinners could not keep up.
In 1753 Kay's house in Bury was ransacked by a mob of textile workers.
They feared that his machines would destroy their livelihood.



Spinning Jenny
1764, James Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny.
One person could spin eight threads at the same time.
When he began to sell the machines, spinners from Lancashire, felt threatened.
They marched on his house and destroyed his equipment.
1770, Hargreaves applies for a patent.
1778, when Hargreaves died, 20,000 spinning jennys were being used in Britain.

Factory Workers
Factory workers were up early and home late.
Everyone had different jobs and responsibilities.
Some jobs would consist of standing in one place all day long and running a machine, or working 14 to 15 hour days.
The worker’s health suffered dramatically.
Their ears would hurt from the consistent noise.
The stale air would make their lungs grow weak.
They would also suffer from a respiratory disease, which was called byssinosis, caused by breathing in the cotton dust.
These are just a few of the many health hazards caused by the awful working conditions.
There were no safety guards on any of the machinery so accidents were very common.
The women’s long hair would get caught in the machinery.
Young “scavengers” who swept the waste from the cotton under the machines would get hurt.
It was very common to get body parts caught in the machinery, which would result in the loss of a finger or even a hand.
You did not dare miss one day of work because the penalty would result in paying a fine.
You could even loose a quarter for the day if you showed up late.
You couldn’t talk to anyone else or even sit down.
Talking back to your boss would immediately get you fired.

Child Labor
Children would start working as young as five years old and some times even younger.
They had very long working hours, which would start as early as 3:00 a.m.
They were expected to work 12-16 hours a day.
They were paid very little.
Factories wanted children to work because they were cheaper labor then adults.
The jobs that were expected of them were often very dangerous and difficult.
Many boys had to guide ponies and donkeys through the mines.
There were many dangers involved in working in the mine, such as explosions, floods, cave-ins and black lung.
Black lung was a respiratory disease caused by breathing coal dust.
Many girls worked hard in the factories.
Most women worked in the textile industry.
Children did not have the opportunity to attend school or even get to play with other children.

Water Power
Falling water power replaced hand power.
Machines had to be near water.
Factories were built next to rivers.
Workers lived in their cottages, but went to work in the factories.
Towns developed around the factories.

Slater Mill
Slater Mill was an early American textile mill named after its founder, Samuel Slater.
Slater is often noted as the father of the American Industrial Revolution.
At the end of the 1700s, Samuel Slater was a young man working in a cotton-spinning mill in England.
While the textile industry was fairly advanced in England by this point, it was also becoming extremely overcrowded.
Due to British laws, machinery was not able to be transported from England to the United States.
The machinery used in mills in the United States was still relatively primitive.
Slater believed he would be able to use his knowledge of textile machinery and mill management to make his own fortune.
When Slater moved to the United States, he learned of two men, Moses Brown and William Almy.
They were trying to revolutionize the textile industry.
Slater came to these men with a plan to rebuild their machines and redesign their mill into a more efficient operation.
Through his work, Slater developed the first successful cotton-spinning mill in the United States.
This mill was central to the launch of the Industrial Revolution and to the growth of a young nation.
After three years he had 30 workers.
All of the workers were children.
They earned about $1 a week.

Lowell: A Factory Town
Francis Cabot Lowell, an American, also sought to gain the technology needed to create textile mills.
Granted a tour of a British mill in 1810, Lowell committed much of the technology to memory.
Collaborating with a group of businessmen they formed the Boston Manufacturing Company.
Lowell developed a textile Mill on the Charles River in Waltham, MA.
Needing water power, the Boston Manufacturing Company moved north to the Merrimack River.
They named the town they created Lowell in honor of their partner who had recently died.
The factory town of Lowell included a number of American innovations to industry.
Paternalistic factories employed mostly women.
Boarding houses were constructed for workers.
Power canals ensured a steady, constant flow of water.
All of the steps needed to create textiles from raw materials were completed under one roof.
A revolution was afoot in the United States, and it spread quickly from textiles to other industries.

         
Steam Engine
1769, James Watt perfected the steam engine.
Steam energy replaced water power.
Factories were set up near raw materials and markets.


Eli Whitney: Cotton Gin
1765, Eli Whitney was born in Westboro, MA.
He went to Yale University.
Later, he worked as a tutor for Catherine Greene, a plantation owner.
He also showed creative mechanical ability.
He worked on building and repairing tools needed in houses and on farms.
1793, Mrs. Greene described to Whitney what was needed to rapidly clean cotton.
The hard outer shell of the cotton plant would cut the skin of the hands of people cleaning the cotton.
A machine that could do this task would complete the work faster than people and would prevent skin injuries.
She provided him with the room and materials needed and encouraged him to tackle the problem.
His landlady suggested he use combs.
After only about 10 days of trying he produced a working model.
Cotton seeds could be removed 50 times faster.
If it was powered by water, it could clean the cotton 1,000 times faster.
1794, he received a patent for it.
He called it the “cotton gin” (“gin”was slang for “engine”) and began making them with his partners.
They couldn’t keep up with demand.
Many people soon copied the device.
A long legal patent rights battle ensued.
Ultimately, neither Whitney nor his sponsor Catherine Greene made money from the cotton gin.
But Whitney did gain historical recognition as its inventor.

Organizing Production
Interchangeable Parts
1798, Eli Whitney organized production using interchangeable parts.
Like parts were the same size and shape.
Whitney used interchangeable parts in making guns.
Guns had been made individually.
No two guns were alike.
Broken parts had to be specially made.
Same size and shape parts allowed less-skilled workers to make or fix guns.

Automation
In automation machines instead of people do a lot of the work.
Late 1790s, Oliver Evans formulated automation ideas that revolutionized American factories.
Evans operated an automated flour mill.
It was water powered.
By automating he only needed 1/5 of the original number of workers it took to run the mill.
Oliver Evans, "Father of the Modern Factory" used the Wye Grist Mill in Wye Mills, Maryland.

Assembly Line
1847, Samuel Colt use an assembly line to produce Colt revolers.
On an assembly line each workers added 2-3 parts to the product.
The parts were interchangeable.
The workers then passes the product on to the next worker until the product is completed.
Unskilled workers could be used on an assembly line.



Iron, Coal, and Steel
Iron
To build machine parts, iron was needed.
To power steam engines, coal was needed.
In the 1700s, ironmaking became expensive.
Charcoal was used to smelt iron.
Charcoal is made by burning wood.
England was running out of forests.
1753, a process of smelting iron with coal was found.
Iron became cheaper to make.
Iron production increased.
Coal mining became a major industry.

Steel
Iron was not strong enough for railroad tracks., bridges, and heavy equipment.



Bessemer Process
1856, Henry Bessemer, found a way to make steel cheaply.
To make steel you remove the impurities from iron.
Bessemer established his steel works at Sheffield, England.
The Bessemer Process lowered the cost from $200 a ton to $4 a ton.

Open-Hearth Process
1863, Pierre-Emile Martin and William Siemens invented the open-hearth process.
The open-hearth process used a special furnance to make steel.
The furnace has a wide, saucer-shaped hearth and a low roof.
Molten pig iron and scrap are packed into the shallow hearth.
They are heated by overhead gas burners using preheated air.
This process was cheaper and you could make different kinds of steel.
Mining towns and steel centers grew where there were supplies of iron ore and coal.

Transporatation
Until the 1700s, land transportation was by horse-drawn wagons.
Travel was slow.
Roads were rough and narrow dirt paths.
It was worse when the roads were muddy.
In the late 1700s, English roads began to improve.
Thomas Telford designed roadbeds so that water would drain off.


    
Macadam Road
Around 1820, John L. McAdam developed the macadam road.
It consisted of creating three layers of stones laid on a crowned subgrade.
There were side ditches for drainage.
The first two layers consisted of angular hand-broken aggregate  at a maximum size of 3 inches.
The depth was about 8 inches.
The third layer was about 2 inches thick with a maximum aggregate size of 1 inch.
Each layer would be compacted with a heavy roller.
This caused the angular stones to lock together with their neighbors.
Wagons could use the roads in all kinds of weather.

Water Travel
The British made their rivers wider and deeper.
They built canals to connect the rivers to factory and mining centers.
Horses walked along the canals and pulled barges.
Barges could carry 50 times what a wagon could.
1830, Great Britain had a complete inland waterway system.
The coming of the railways did have an effect on the canal system.
Some were in part purchased by railway companies and converted into railway trackbed.

Canals
Erie Canal
1825 October 26, the Erie Canal was officially opened.
The first boat, the Seneca Chief left Buffalo for New York City.
It arrived less than two weeks later on November 4 and was greeted with great fanfare.
By the mid 1830s the canal was doing a brisk business.
The canal was the brainchild of New York's Governor, Dewitt Clinton.
The Erie Canal linked New York's Hudson River with Lake Erie.
It allowed passengers and goods to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes.

Illinois & Michigan Canal
In 1848, the Illinois and Michigan canal linked the Great Lakes to the Illinois River and then to the Mississipp.
This opened up the interior of the United States.
But by the 1850s, the rapid growth of faster railroads provided water transportation with stiff competition.

Railroad
Donkeys had pulled mining cars on wooden rails.
Wooden rails were replaced by iron rails.


1804, the first steam locomotive to run on tracks was built by Richard Trevithick.
Inventors began to build locomotives to run on the iron rails.
1829, George Stephenson won a contest to built the best locomotive.


Stephenson's locomotive, the Rocket, could pull a train 36 mph.
This startd a railroad building boom.

Steamboats
1787, John Fitch made the first successful trial of a forty-five-foot steamboat on the Delaware River.
Robert Fulton developed the steamboat.


1807, the Clermont made the trip from Albany to New York City in 32 hours.
Steamboats carried passengers and cargo along the inland waterways of the United States and Europe.
Steamboats did not replace sailing ships that crossed the ocean until the late 1800s.
Sailing ships took two months to cross the Atlantic.
Steamboats made the trip in ten days.

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