SPINDLE, LOOM, AND NEEDLE IN NEW ENGLAND
The major steps in the manufacture of clothes are four: first to harvest and clean the fiber or wool; second, to card it and spin it into threads; third, to weave the threads into cloth; and, finally to fashion and sew the cloth into clothes.We have already seen the influence of Eli Whitney's cotton gin on the first process, and the series of inventions for spinning and weaving, which so profoundly changed the textile industry in Great Britain, has been mentioned.It will be the business of this chapter to tell how spinning and weaving machinery was introduced into the United States and how a Yankee inventor laid the keystone of the arch of clothing machinery by his invention of the sewing machine.
Great Britain was determined to keep to herself the industrial secrets she had gained.According to the economic beliefs of the eighteenth century, which gave place but slowly to the doctrines of Adam Smith, monopoly rather than cheap production was the road to success.The laws therefore forbade the export of English machinery or drawings and specifications by which machines might be constructed in other countries.Some men saw a vast prosperity for Great Britain, if only the mystery might be preserved.
Meanwhile the stories of what these machines could do excited envy in other countries, where men desired to share in the industrial gains.And, even before Eli Whitney's cotton gin came to provide an abundant supply of raw material, some Americans were struggling to improve the old hand loom, found in every house, and to make some sort of a spinning machine to replace the spinning wheel by which one thread at a time was laboriously spun.
East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was the scene of one of the earliest of these experiments.There in 1786 two Scotchmen, who claimed to understand Arkwright's mechanism, were employed to make spinning machines, and about the same time another attempt was made at Beverly.In both instances the experiments were encouraged by the State and assisted with grants of money.The machines, operated by horse power, were crude, and the product was irregular and unsatisfactory.Then three men at Providence, Rhode Island, using drawings of the Beverly machinery, made machines having thirty-two spindles which worked indifferently.
The attempt to run them by water power failed, and they were sold to Moses Brown of Pawtucket, who with his partner, William Almy, had mustered an army of hand-loom weavers in 1790, large enough to produce nearly eight thousand yards of cloth in that year.
Brown's need of spinning machinery, to provide his weavers with yarn, was very great; but these machines he had bought would not run, and in 1790 there was not a single successful power-spinner in the United States.
Meanwhile Benjamin Franklin had come home, and the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and Useful Arts was offering prizes for inventions to improve the textile industry.
And in Milford, England, was a young man named Samuel Slater, who, on hearing that inventive genius was munificently rewarded in America, decided to migrate to that country.Slater at the age of fourteen had been apprenticed to Jedediah Strutt, a partner of Arkwright.He had served both in the counting-house and the mill and had had every opportunity to learn the whole business.
Soon after attaining his majority, he landed in New York, November, 1789, and found employment.From New York he wrote to Moses Brown of Pawtucket, offering his services, and that old Quaker, though not giving him much encouragement, invited him to Pawtucket to see whether he could run the spindles which Brown had bought from the men of Providence."If thou canst do what thou sayest," wrote Brown, "I invite thee to come to Rhode Island."Arriving in Pawtucket in January, 1790, Slater pronounced the machines worthless, but convinced Almy and Brown that he knew his business, and they took him into partnership.He had no drawings or models of the English machinery, except such as were in his head, but he proceeded to build machines, doing much of the work himself.On December 20, 1790, he had ready carding, drawing, and roving machines and seventy-two spindles in two frames.The water-wheel of an old fulling mill furnished the power--and the machinery ran.
Here then was the birth of the spinning industry in the United States.The "Old Factory," as it was to be called for nearly a hundred years, was built at Pawtucket in 1793.Five years later Slater and others built a second mill, and in 1806, after Slater had brought out his brother to share his prosperity, he built another.Workmen came to work for him solely to learn his machines, and then left him to set up for themselves.The knowledge he had brought soon became widespread.Mills were built not only in New England but in other States.In 1809 there were sixty-two spinning mills in operation in the country, with thirty-one thousand spindles; twenty-five more mills were building or projected, and the industry was firmly established in the United States.The yarn was sold to housewives for domestic use or else to professional weavers who made cloth for sale.This practice was continued for years, not only in New England, but also in those other parts of the country where spinning machinery had been introduced.
