CHAPTER XVIII THE MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES Various types of manufacturing establishments. When we think of a manufacturing industry nowadays, we are very likely to form a picture of a huge building or group of buildings, dominated by a tall chimney and filled with roaring machinery and busy men and women. Such is, indeed, the typical factory, though much manufacturing is still done in small shops where a few men work with small and comparatively simple tools. In the large factory the tools and the raw material, as well as the buildings, engines, etc., are usually owned by one man or group of men, while the work is done by another group. In smaller establishments various combinations are found. One kind of manufacturing establishment which is still numerous and widely distributed is the small shop where the worker owns his own tools and equipment, buys his own raw materials, and sells the finished product. It does not constitute much of a change, certainly not a revolution, when he hires a few helpers or apprentices to assist him. They work with his tools upon his raw materials, and they receive their compensation in the form of wages instead of in the form of a share of the profits of the business. Even where the owner ceases to do any of the work except to keep the accounts, buy the raw materials and sell the products, and exercise general supervision and management, the transition may have been so gradual as to attract no one's attention. By this gradual change, however, a type of manufactory may be developed which is very different from that with which it started. But the transition is not always made in this way. Other methods of organization have existed at various times, and still exist. In one class of shops the worker owns his own tools and runs his own shop, but does not own the raw materials upon which he works. These are furnished by an outside person who supplies them and owns the finished product, paying the worker a price agreed upon for the work which he does. In this case also the worker may hire a few helpers or apprentices. Still another method is found where the worker owns neither the materials upon which nor the tools with which he works. A third person supplies both materials and tools, — everything, in fact, except the place in which the work is done. This the laborer himself supplies. In the modern factory, however, everything is assembled in one building or group of buildings, around one power plant; everything is owned by one group of individuals, and the laborer furnishes nothing except his own skill and strength. The great advantage of this system is its economical use of power. Wherever a large use of power is necessary, it is important that it be effectively and economically utilized. In all such cases the factory, in this modern sense, tends to displace all other methods of manufacturing. Where comparatively little power is required, and where, therefore, it is not of such great importance that it be economized, other methods still survive. In some cases, however, the competition of the factory is so severe as to force the workers in the small shops to work for very low wages. Where the main factor in success is the skill of the worker rather than cheap power, the small shop will probably continue to compete successfully with the factory. There has been a general tendency, however, for the large factory to grow and the small shop to decline in importance. Progress toward large-scale production. The stages of this development from the small shop to the factory are by no means clear. Almost every form of manufacturing will be found in every stage of economic development. The large factory has come to be the dominant form only since the invention of power-driven machinery. The industrial revolution, as it is called, was the rather sudden growth of the factory to this dominant position during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Power-driven machinery and large-scale production. A remarkable series of inventions followed one another in rapid succession and transformed several of the large industries of England into factory industries. These changes put England definitely in the lead as a manufacturing nation. The same revolution came in other countries a little later. Says Marshall:1 The quarter of a century beginning with 1760 saw improvements follow one another in manufacture even more rapidly than in agriculture. During that period the transport of heavy goods was cheapened by Brindley's canals, the production of power by Watt's steam engine, and that of iron by Cort's processes of puddling and rolling and by Roebuck's method of smelting it by coal in lieu of the charcoal that had become scarce; Hargreaves, Crompton, Arkwright, Cartwright, and others invented, or at least made economically serviceable, the spinning jenny, the mule, the carding machine, and the power loom; Wedgwood gave a great impetus to the pottery trade that was already growing rapidly; and there were important inventions in printing from cylinders, in bleaching by chemical agents, and in other processes. A cotton factory was for the first time driven directly by steam power in 1785, the last year of the period. The beginning of the nineteenth century saw steamships and steam printing presses, and the use of gas for lighting towns. Railway locomotives, telegraphy, and photography came a little later. Our own age has seen numberless improvements and new economies in production, prominent among which are those relating to the production of steel, the telephone, the electric light, and the gas engine; and the social changes arising from material progress are in some respects more rapid than ever. But the groundwork of the changes that have happened since 1785 was chiefly laid in the inventions of the years 1760 to 1785. The inventions which preceded the cotton factory. A more detailed account is given in Walpole's "History of England from 1815 "2: 1 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 4th ed., p. 42. London, 1898. 2 Quoted from Bullock's "Selected Readings in Economics," pp. 128-143. Ginn and Company, Boston, 1907. In the middle of the eighteenth century, then, a piece of cotton cloth, in the true sense of the term, had never been made in England. The so-called cotton goods were all made in the cottages of the weavers. The yarn was carded by hand; it was spun by hand; it was worked into cloth by a hand loom. The weaver was usually the head of the family; his wife and unmarried daughters spun the yarn for him. Spinning was the ordinary occupation of every girl, and the distaff was, for countless centuries, the ordinary occupation of every woman. The occupation was so universal that the distaff was occasionally used as a synonym for woman." "Le royaume de France ne tombe point en quenouille.' To this day every unmarried girl is commonly described as a spinster. ... The operation of weaving was, however, much more rapid than that of spinning. The weaver consumed more weft than his own family could supply him with; and the weavers generally experienced the greatest difficulty in obtaining sufficient yarn. THE FLY SHUTTLE About the middle of the eighteenth century the ingenuity of two persons, a father and a son, made this difference more apparent. The shuttle had originally been thrown by the hand from one end of the loom to the other. John Kay, a native of Bury, by his invention of the fly shuttle, saved the weaver from this labor. . . . By means of these inventions the productive power of each weaver was doubled. Each weaver was easily able to perform the amount of work which had previously required two men to do, and the spinsters found themselves more hopelessly distanced than ever in their efforts to supply the weavers with weft. . . . HARGREAVES'S SPINNING JENNY The trade was in this humble and primitive state when a series of extraordinary and unparalleled inventions revolutionized the conditions under which cotton had been hitherto prepared. A little more than a century ago (1764-1767) James Hargreaves, a poor weaver in the neighborhood of Blackburn, was returning home from a long walk, in which he had been purchasing a further supply of yarn for his loom. As he entered his cottage his wife, Jenny, accidentally upset the spindle which she was using. Hargreaves noticed that the spindles, which were now thrown into an upright position, continued to revolve, and that the thread was still spinning in his wife's hand. The idea immediately occurred to him that it would be possible to connect a considerable number of upright spindles with one wheel, and thus multiply the productive power of each spinster. He contrived a frame in one part of which he placed eight rovings in a row, and in another part a row of eight spindles. . . . His ignorant neighbors hastily concluded that a machine which enabled one spinster to do the work of eight would throw multitudes of persons out of employment. A mob broke into his house and destroyed his machine. Hargreaves himself had to retire to Nottingham, where, with the friendly assistance of another person, he was able to take out a patent for the spinning jenny, as the machine, in compliment to his industrious wife, was called. ARKWRIGHT'S WATER FRAME The invention of the spinning jenny gave a new impulse to the cotton manufacture. But the invention of the spinning jenny, if it had been accompanied by no other improvements, would not have allowed any purely cotton goods to be manufactured in England. The yarn spun by the jenny, like that which had previously been spun by hand, was neither fine enough nor hard enough to be employed as warp, and linen or woolen threads had consequently to be used for this purpose. In the very year, however, (1769) in which Hargreaves moved from Blackburn to Nottingham, Richard Arkwright took out a patent for his still more celebrated machine. The principle of Arkwright's great invention is very simple. He passed the thread over two pairs of rollers, one of which was made to revolve much more rapidly than the other. The thread, after passing over the pair revolving slowly, was drawn into the requisite tenuity by the rollers revolving at a higher rapidity. By this simple but memorable invention Arkwright succeeded in producing thread capable of employment as warp. From the circumstance that the mill at which his machinery was first erected was driven by water power, the machine received the somewhat inappropriate name of the water frame; the thread spun by it was usually called the water twist. ... PAUL'S CARDING MACHINE The invention of the fly shuttle by John Kay had enabled the weavers to consume more cotton than the spinsters had been able to provide; the invention of the spinning jenny and the water frame would have been useless if the old system of hand carding had not been superseded by a more efficient and more rapid process. Just as Arkwright applied rotatory motion to spinning, so Lewis Paul introduced revolving cylinders for carding cotton. Paul's machine consisted of "a horizontal cylinder, covered in its whole circumference with parallel rows of cards with intervening spaces, and turned by a handle. Under the cylinder was a concave frame lined internally with cards exactly fitting the lower half of the cylinder, so that when the handle was turned the cards of the cylinder and of the concave frame worked against each other and carded the wool." "The cardings were of course only of the length of the cylinder, but an ingenious apparatus was attached |