In 1763, James Watt was employed in repairing a model of Newcomen’s steam engine, and, noting certain basic defects, undertook to remedy them. He perceived the vast possibilities of a properly constructed engine and, after years of patient labor he gave to the world the mighty power of steam. Previous to this time, and indeed until the year 1782, the steam engine had been used almost exclusively to pump water out of mines, but with Watt’s improvements it became possible for the engine to give rotary motion to machinery.
The first cotton mill to install a steam engine made by Boulton and Watt was the one owned by the Messrs. Robinson in Nottinghamshire—this was about the year 1785. Two years earlier, Arkwright had made use of an atmospheric engine in his Manchester factory, but it was not until 1789 that an improved steam engine was set up in that city and it was a year later when Arkwright adopted the device.
The invention of spinning-machinery created the cotton manufacture of England, but the industry would never have reached the proportions which it presently did except for the genius of Watt.
IV
THE FACTORY SYSTEM
When the cotton manufacture was in its infancy, all the operations, from dressing the raw material to folding the finished fabric, were completed under the roof of the weaver’s cottage. With Arkwright’s invention it became the custom to spin the yarn in factories and weave it by hand in cottages. With the invention of the power loom, it again became the practice to perform all the processes in a single building.
The weaver’s cottage, then, with its rude apparatus of peg warping, hand cards, spinning-wheels, and wooden looms, was the steam factory in miniature; but the amount of labor performed in a single factory was as great as that which formerly gave occupation to the inhabitants of an entire district. A good hand-loom weaver could produce two pieces of shirtings each week; by 1823, a power-loom weaver produced seven such pieces in the same time.
A factory containing two hundred looms was operated by one hundred persons who wove seven hundred pieces a week, and it was estimated that under the domestic system at least eight hundred and seventy-five looms would have been required to weave this amount of cloth, because the women of the household had their home duties to perform while the men were required to devote a considerable portion of their time to farming. It was therefore further estimated that the work done in a steam factory containing two hundred looms would, if performed by hand, give employment and support to a population of more than two thousand persons. It is interesting here to note, that, whereas a hand-loom weaver could produce two pieces of shirtings a week, an ordinary weaver is now able to turn off eight or ten pieces of equal length every ten hours; so that a modern weave room containing two hundred power looms operated by twenty-five weavers represents the labor of a community of sixty thousand craftsmen, their wives and their children. A population of thirty million would be required to perform by hand the work now produced by the Fall River factories alone.
“Watt,” said a celebrated French engineer, “improves the steam engine, and this single improvement causes the industry of England to make an immense stride. This machine, at the present time [about 1830], represents the power of three hundred thousand horses or of two million men, strong and well fitted for labor, who should work night and day without an interruption and without repose.... A hairdresser invents, or at least brings into action, a machine for spinning cotton; this alone gives the British industry immense superiority. Fifty years only, after this great discovery, more than one million of the inhabitants of England are employed in those operations which depend, directly or indirectly, on the action of this machine. Lastly, England exports cotton, spun and woven by an admirable system of machinery, to the value of four hundred million francs yearly.... The British navigator travels in quest of the cotton of India, brings it from a distance of four thousand leagues, commits it to an operation of the machines of Arkwright, carries back their products to the East, making them again to travel four thousand leagues, and in spite of the loss of time—in spite of the enormous expense incurred by this voyage of eight thousand leagues, the cotton manufactured by the machinery of England becomes less costly than the cotton of India, spun and woven by hand near the field that produced it, and sold at the nearest market. So great is the power of the progress of machinery.”
Two distinct systems of production preceded the factory. First, the system of isolated handicraft labor, and second, the system of cottage industry, which we have already considered and in which the several members of a family participated,—this, too, was handicraft. The craftsman, as we have seen, worked with his family in his own cottage; he owned his loom and the other simple machinery necessary for the production of cloth, and either he owned his raw material or received it from the master manufacturer to be returned in the form of finished fabric. But in either case, the craftsman was his own master and sold cloth not labor.
With the establishment of the factory, these conditions were completely changed. The master manufacturer not only owned the factory building and the machinery, but he owned the raw material. Moreover to him the operative sold his labor which thereby became a commodity quite as completely as the cotton he wove into cloth. This latter circumstance is important because it became the source of the vast social discontent which, in the end, aided powerfully in revolutionizing the structure of British society.