A few years before Watt completed his improved steam engine, the old spinning wheel had been supplanted by the modern system, in which the thread is drawn out by means of spindles revolving at different rates of speed. The spindles, which had at first been run by water power, could now be propelled by steam. The old loom had also been improved, and weaving by steam began to become general after the year 1800.
Use of steam cheapens iron.
New method of producing steel.
Machinery, however, could not become common so long as iron and steel were expensive. The first use, therefore, to which the crude steam engines were put was to furnish a blast which enabled the iron smelter to employ coal instead of charcoal to fuse the iron ore (1777). Moreover, the steam pumps made it possible for the miners to pump out the water which impeded their work in the mines, and in this way cheapened both the iron and the coal. Soon the so-called "puddling furnace" was invented, by means of which steel was produced much more economically than it could be earlier. Rolling mills run by steam then took the place of the hammers with which the steel had formerly been beaten into shape. These discoveries of the use of steam and coal and iron revolutionized the life of the people at large in western Europe more quickly than any of the events which have been previously recorded in this volume. It is the aim of the remainder of this chapter to indicate very briefly the variety and importance of the effects produced by modern inventions.[465]
Domestic industry supplanted by the factory system.
278. Machinery although very efficient was expensive, and had necessarily to be near the boilers which produced the steam. Consequently machines for particular purposes were grouped in factories, and the workmen left their homes and gathered in large establishments. The hand worker with his old tools was more and more at a disadvantage compared with the workman who produced commodities by machinery. The result was inevitable, namely, that domestic industry was supplanted by the factory.
Advantages of machinery.
Division of labor.
One of the principal advantages of the factory system is that it makes possible a minute division of labor. Instead of giving his time and thought to the whole process, each worker concentrates his attention upon one single step of the process, and by repeating a simple set of motions over and over again acquires wonderful dexterity. At the same time the period of necessary apprenticeship is shortened under the factory system, because each separate task is comparatively simple. Moreover, the invention of new machinery is increased, because the very subdivision of the process into simple steps often suggests some way of substituting mechanical motion for the motion of the human hand.