machinery, except in very rare cases such as windmills and watermills for grinding corn, meant nothing more than tools, whose driving-power was in the muscles

Machinery. of the workmen. Practically, it was only for grinding corn that wind and water had been called in to replace the millstones worked by hand. Steam had been applied only to pumping. Wind is too unstable and too uncontrollable to be brought into general use; but in the second half of the century, water-power was first brought into play, and then gave place to steam when the discoveries of James Watt placed its enormous powers at the service of man, and the vast hidden wealth of the coal-fields was brought to light for its production. The manufacturing industries were concentrated in the regions first where water-power, and then where coal, was most readily available. Machinery required the workers to be congregated in its immediate neighbourhood, and to work in regiments, not at their individual pleasure or convenience. Before the nineteenth century opened, the factory system was established, and domestic work and manufacture had almost disappeared.

The first great manufacturing industry taken up in England had been the making of woollen cloths, with which, or after Existing major which, developed the associated industries such Industries. as spinning and the manufacture of other textile fabrics. The woollen industry was very much the largest in England, while the making of linen flourished in Ireland and Scotland. Silk-weaving had become important, but the cotton industry was still in its infancy. Outside this group there was a considerable production of iron and ironware. Hitherto, however, the furnaces for smelting iron had been of charcoal; the application of coal to the purpose had only been experimental, and the product of iron had been restricted to the localities where forests and iron-fields were contiguous.

There are two purposes served by machinery; one is to increase the output as compared with the amount of human energy expended; the other is to increase accuracy of

The Fly

shuttle.

workmanship. The introduction of new machinery began with a sort of race between the spinners and weavers. In 1732, the spinners were leading; that is to say, in a given time they could produce more yarn than the weavers could manipulate. The reason was that the spinners were much more numerous than the weavers, when every cottage had its spinning-wheel. The first step, therefore, was to increase the weaver's output; and the first invention was the fly-shuttle of John Kay. This enabled one weaver to accomplish what had hitherto been the work of two; he could weave a piece of cloth of double-width. The fly-shuttle was soon taken up, and now the spinners were left behind. The weavers could not get enough yarn from them to keep themselves fully employed. The first attempts to improve upon the spinning-wheel were not crowned with success. But in 1764, James Hargreaves invented the spinning-jenny, which in effect Hargreaves' worked eight spindles at once. Moreover, the Jenny.

new instrument could be worked by a child; and it was also very soon realised that even a hundred spindles could be worked as well as eight. At this rate the spinners were finding themselves turning out much more yarn than was wanted ; that is, than the weavers could work up. Besides, the spinners were generally so far in the position of employees that they were supplied with the wool by the weavers who would not give out more than they could work up, and if the output of the individual spinner was thus multiplied, the spinners began to anticipate that many of them would be thrown out of employment. Hargreaves' machines were smashed up, and he had to migrate to Nottingham. Hargreaves' jenny was followed up in 1769 by that of Richard Arkwright, who worked on a plan which had already been tried unsuccessfully by Lewis Paul. The inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright were both applied in the first instance not to wool, but to cotton, and Arkwright's invention had the particular merit of producing a much finer and stronger thread than before; especially as

Arkwright.

improved upon by Samuel Crompton with the machine which came to be called the mule. The particular significance, however, of Arkwright's water-frame lay not so much in its superiority as a tool as in the fact that it was worked by water-power, whereas Hargreaves' jenny was still a hand jenny. The principles applied to cotton-spinning were very soon applied to wool, and for the time the spinners suffered because the weavers could not keep pace with their output.

Power-loom.

It was Edmund Cartwright, a clergyman, who restored the balance by inventing the power-loom in 1784, a loom in Cartwright's which machinery did the work which had been done previously by hand. In 1789, he set up the first power-loom driven by steam. In the same year he patented a wool-comber, a disastrous blow at the time to the hand-combers, since one machine did the work of twenty men, and did it very much better. Labour-saving machinery injures the workers at first; though they commonly gain in the end, because the cheapening of production creates an enlarged demand, which, in the long-run, actually increases the amount of employment. For instance, if a machine does the work of twenty men, the diminished price of the product may multiply the demand by forty as soon as the change has become generally felt, and thus there will be employment for double the original number of men. But at the outset, the demand, though increased, would not overtake the increased rate of output; and thus sudden advances in labour-saving machinery produce immediate unemployment, and consequent hostility on the part of the workmen. Hence the machine-smashing from which inventors and manufacturers frequently suffered during the era of the industrial revolution.

Iron

The progress of iron and the progress of steam were somewhat intimately connected, because the use of iron and steel in machinery very much increased the utility of steam. But in the first half of the eighteenth century, the production of iron was not greatly prospering. The amount imported increased continuously. While char

and Coal.

coal furnaces were a necessity, fuel was becoming more costly. For other purposes the use of coal as fuel was on the increase; but there was difficulty in obtaining an adequate blast for coke, while for coal it appeared impossible. At the Coalbrookdale Works, however, the Darbies succeeded in using coke for smelting, and had considerably developed its employment towards the middle of the century. A great improvement in the blast was introduced with an engine invented by Smeaton, and adopted at the Carron Iron Works, near Stirling, in 1760. This more than trebled the output from the coke furnace. Roughly speaking, from the middle of the century, coke, and ultimately coal, were driving charcoal out of the field. Improved processes of casting iron, and Huntsman's invention of cast steel, accompanied by the increased output from the coke and coal furnaces, made the use of iron practicable in new fields; and some time before the end of the century, the great iron master, John Wilkinson, was proclaiming that iron was the true material for building bridges, houses, and ships. His enthusiasm carried him to the point of having an iron coffin made for himself; and superior scepticism mocked at him, as in later days the Quarterly gibed at George Stephenson. Nevertheless, the first iron bridge was actually thrown over the Severn in 1779, and on the Severn also Wilkinson himself launched the first iron ship eleven years later.

The final triumph of coal and coke over charcoal came later, when the latter was displaced in the manufacture of malleable iron by the process of which Henry Cort was the inventor. Fifteen tons could be turned out by the new process in twelve hours where before it had been possible to produce only

one ton.

The improved blast which enabled coal and coke to supersede charcoal, was attained by the use of water-power. The great desiderata for ironworks in the earlier New Iron stage of their progress were iron-fields, water- Districts. power, and accessible coal. Hence the industry perished in Sussex, which had hitherto been a principal centre because

of the accessibility of forests; whereas neither coal nor waterpower were accessible. Under the new conditions the Forest of Dean held its own, while the industry developed with great rapidity in new regions-in Scotland, in Yorkshire, and in South Wales. The development of steam-power made the accessibility of coal no less necessary, although water-power ceased to be a requisite. Steam allowed, and demanded, a closer concentration than was possible when the neighbourhood of waterfalls and the banks of streams were the places where factories were of necessity planted, and the factory town displaced what might be called the factory village.

The

In the seventeenth century, though the steam-pump had been invented, it was actually not much more than a toy on a large scale; that is to say, no attempt Steam-pump. had been made to utilise it for industrial purposes. But the increasing depth to which mines, especially copper and tin mines, were being driven at that period, was making the question of pumping the water out of them a pressing one. A steam-pump, or 'fire-engine,' as it was called, was invented for this purpose by Thomas Savery in 1698; but this was an exceedingly clumsy contrivance which was almost immediately superseded by the improved engine of Thomas Newcomen. Newcomen's engine, modified by occasional improvements, was used to a considerable extent until the inventions of James Watt rendered it obsolete. But its use was only for pumping, and it was very costly. Primarily it was employed only for mines, though the water it pumped up began to be used to provide power for working the blast for furnaces.

James Watt.

But in 1763, a Newcomen pump came into the hands of James Watt for repair, when he was working in Glasgow as a maker of mathematical instruments. This set him upon the experiments which revolutionised manufacture by the application of steam-power as the driving force for machinery. Watt very soon lighted upon the principles which developed the modern steam-engine out of the steam-pump; but to design a steam-engine was not