30 Jan 2020

Quarry Bank Mill: A Technology Museum from the Industrial Revolution

A couple of years ago (and from time to time since) I wrote a series of blog posts about technology museums. Here are the links:

Quarry Bank Mill

Today it's time for another museum of technology that I highly recommend. It's just not computer or electronic technology. It is really a museum about the first thing that got highly automated during the industrial revolution: spinning and weaving. I guess a mill like that was roughly equivalent to the fab of its day, requiring advanced technology, capital, and trade secrets.

The museum is Quarry Bank Mill, and it is about 10 minutes from Manchester Airport. I was in the UK in the fall and I went there, mostly because I don't have any pictures the last time I went over 20 years ago. By visiting the mill, you can see how impossible it would have been to create large amounts of thread and cloth by hand in a reasonable time, and how suddenly people could afford clothes.

It is hard to underestimate the significance of the industrial revolution. As Luke Muehlhauser puts it:

Everything was awful for a very long time, and then the industrial revolution happened.

Despite everything you learned in history about great inventions like the wheel, or catastrophes like the black death, or the renaissance or the reformation, nothing really changed. Life expectancy, the amount of energy per capita, the growth of democracy, all were flat until the industrial revolution.

Cloth and clothing was one thing that was dramatically changed by mills like Quarry Bank and later similar mills in New England. I remember reading a few years ago something that had never occurred to me. Why are so many women and girls, even princesses, are at spinning wheels in fairy stories? Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty to name two. That's because spinning by hand was really slow and inefficient and it took all the females to create thread (and all the males to work the fields). A single weaver could use up thread really fast—their problem was that they never had enough thread to weave.

Quarry Bank Mill was initially powered by a waterwheel. It is still there turning, although if you look closely you'll see that it's not actually connected to the driveshafts than run all through the mill. Somewhere I think that they have an electric motor hidden away. Later, it was driven by steam power, and those engines are still there, too. They were running the day I was there.

Spinning

Arkwright's spinning jenney could do the work of hundreds of women. It was the first part of the manufacture of cloth that was automated. There was really little point in bothering to automate weaving until spinning was automated since it would take thousands of people spinning to keep up. It is a little hard to see but there are a couple of hundred threads running from left to right. They are easier to see in the close up of the mechanism on the right. The entire right-hand side of the picture on the left moves back and forth on the tracks you can see in the picture on the right. They pull out about ten feet of unspun thread, then on the pointed metal bits it is spun. Then the carriage moves back and the newly spun thread is collected on a spindle and the process repeats, spinning about 2,000' of thread every 30 seconds or so. It was not working this time when I was there, so I couldn't make a video of it working, but here's one I found on YouTube.

Weaving

The weavers loved the first stage of the industrial revolution since they could get enough thread for the first time ever. Above is a hand-loom from that period.

One of the key pieces of technology for automating weaving was the flying shuttle. This is wound up with thread (the weft) and tossed between the warp threads where the odd and even threads are alternatively lifted (or sometimes more complex patterns). Before the looms were automated, this meant that weavers could finally weave cloth that was wider than their arms. But with a few more incremental inventions, such as a device for detecting when the shuttle was empty and stop the loom, it was possible to automate the weaving.

Here's a video I made of the loom above running:

Mills in the US

From 1774, it became illegal to export textile machinery out of Britain, including parts, plans, models, and so on.

But that didn't stop a British-American called Samuel Slater. He memorized the construction plans for Akwright's factory. He then left for the US without telling anyone and created the first mill in the US to use the Arkwright system in 1793, at Pawtucket RI. Or, as it says in The Spies Who Launched America’s Industrial Revolution:

From water-powered textile mills, to mechanical looms, much of the machinery that powered America's early industrial success was "borrowed" from Europe.

Slater went on to be known as the "Father of American Industry" since he was really the first industrialist. The 1774 law was not repealed until 1843, by which time the secrets had become widespread and the policy was obsolete.

More Details

Quarry Bank Mill is owned by the British National Trust. Here is the Quarry Bank Mill webpage. There is also a Wikipedia page.

The US Pawtucket Mill is also a museum (which I have not visited). It has a Wikipedia page. It doesn't have its own website, but it has a Facebook page. There seems to be some textile machinery there (and a water wheel).

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