As these periods are not materially exclusive, so also there are close economic relations subsisting between the development of machinery and motor, and between the improvements in manufacture and in the transport industry. But in order to understand the nature of the irregularity which is discernible in the history of the development of machinery, it is essential to consider these factors both separately and in the historical and economic relation they stand to each other. For this purpose we will examine two large staple industries, the textile and the iron industries of England, in order that we may trace in the chief steps of their progress the laws of the evolution of modern machinery.
The textile industry offers special facilities to such a study. The strongest and most widespread of English manufactures, it furnishes in the early eighteenth century the clearest examples of the several forms of industry. To the several branches of this industry the earliest among the great inventions were applied. This start in industrial development has been maintained, so that the most advanced forms of the modern factory are found in textile industry. Moreover, the close attention which has been given to, and the careful records which have been kept of certain branches of this work, in particular the Lancashire cotton industry, enable us to trace the operation of the new industrial forces here with greater precision than is the case with any other industry. As Schulze-Gaevernitz, in his masterly study, says of the cotton industry—"The English cotton industry is not only the oldest, but is in many respects that modern industry which manifests most clearly the characteristics of modern industrial methods, both in their economic and their social relations."[68]
The iron industry has been selected on the ground of its close connection with the application of steam-driven machinery to the several industries. It is in a sense the most fundamental industry of modern times, inasmuch as it furnishes the material environment of the great modern economic forces. Moreover, we have the advantage of tracing the growth of the iron manufacture ab ovo, for, as we have seen, before the industrial revolution it played a most insignificant part in English commerce.
Lastly, a study of the relations between the growth of the iron and the textile industries will be of special service in assisting us to realise the character of the interaction of the several manufactures under the growing integration of modern industry.[69]
§ 5. In observing the order of inventions applied to textile industries, the first point of significance is that cotton, a small industry confined to a part of Lancashire, and up to 1768 dependent upon linen in order to furnish a complete cloth, should take the lead.
The woollen trades, in the first half of the eighteenth century, as we saw, engaged the attention of a vastly larger number of persons, and played a much more important part in our commerce. The silk trade had received new life from the flow of intelligent French workers, and the first modern factory with elaborate machinery was that set up for silk throwing by Lombe. Yet by far the larger number of the important textile inventions of the eighteenth century were either applied in the first instance to the cotton manufacture and transferred, sometimes after a lapse of many years, to the woollen, worsted, and other textile trades, or being invented for woollen trades, proved unsuccessful until applied to cotton.[70]
Although the origin and application of inventive genius is largely independent of known laws, and may provisionally be relegated to the domain of "accident," there are certain reasons which favoured the cotton industry in the industrial race. Its concentration in South Lancashire and Staffordshire, as compared with the wide diffusion of the woollen industries, facilitated the rapid acceptance of new methods and discoveries. Moreover, the cotton industry being of later origin, and settling itself in unimportant villages and towns, had escaped the influence of official regulations and customs which prevailed in the woollen centres and proved serious obstacles to the introduction of new industrial methods.[71] Even in Lancashire itself official inspectors regulated the woollen trade at Manchester, Rochdale, Blackburn, and Bury.[72]
The cotton industry had from the beginning been free from all these fetters. The shrewd, practical business character which marks Lancashire to-day is probably a cause as well as a result of the great industrial development of the last hundred years.
Moreover, it was recognised, even before the birth of the great inventions, that cotton goods, when brought into free competition with woollen goods, could easily undersell them and supplant them in popular consumption. This knowledge held out a prospect of untold fortune to inventors who should, by the application of machinery, break through the limitations imposed upon production by the restricted number of efficient workers in some of the processes through which the cotton yarn must pass.
But the stimulus which one invention afforded to another gave an accumulative power to the application of new methods. This is especially seen in the alternation of inventions in the two chief processes of spinning and weaving.