Textile Manufacturing
Obviously, the Industrial Revolution's, textile manufacturing is hugely important to life even today. A textile is a flexible material consisting of a network of natural or artificial fibers. Without it i really don't know what we'd wear or how we'd keep warm.
The event that really set off this new trend in the manufacturing of textiles, in large amounts, was Eli Whitney's, 1792, invention of the cotton gin - a machine that automated the separation of cottonseed from the short-staple cotton fiber. With this cotton would now become much more popular, for it is much more accessible at this point. The next vital event would be when Joesph Jacquard invented the Jacquard Loom, in 1804, that wove complex patterns. It recognized patterns by recording holes, in a string of cards, that the machine would make. By 1856 William Perkins created the first sythetic dye; this would change textiles forever, making more variety and style with them. There are fout main sub branches to the textile industry, the woollen industry, the silk industry, the cotton industry and the linen industry. The woollen industry started to take off with the invention of the spinning jenny - this made the spinning of wool faster and tighter, making wool more common. With this many wool spinning factories arose, but by 1803 most of these factories would become inactive for one reason or another and wool would once again be a homemade product. Silk was actually first popularly used in ancient China. It then died down for along time and would only be used by the extremely wealthy, for silk is both hard to weave and find. Silk arose again, in about 1793 when a man name George Courtauld went into buissiness manufacturing silk. By 1814 he created the silk spindle and this advanced the level of manufacturing greatly. In 1820 the power loom was invented and could be used on silk. By 1833 thousands of power looms were being used not just all over the country, but the world. Since then the silk industry has only grown. By 1820 more than 2,500 workers were imployeed with the manufacturing of cotton. There were over 1,000 looms bein used in the country and cotton had topped the wool buissiness. The linen industry would start up around 1790 with the invention of the lax-spinner, that would spin flax (a hard woody material used in the manufacturing of linen). Linen became greatly expensive in the time of the Industrial Revolution and still is today. There were different kinds of linen though; you could get linen with a lower thread count and this would be less soft than a higher thread count, it would also be less expensive though. So as you can see, textile manufacturing was and is a huge part of society. If it did not exist we might still have been making all our clothes ourselves, no one would have large wardrobes, and fashion would be an unobtainable concept. SG "The Textile System." Spartacus Educational - Home Page. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2010. http://www.spartacus.schoolnetnet.co.uk/Textiles.htm. |