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Before the 1760s, textile production was a cottage industry using mainly flax and wool. A typical weaving family would own one handloom, which would be operated by the man with help of a boy; the wife, girls and other women could make sufficient yarn for that loom. The knowledge of textile production had existed for centuries.
The Lowell system, also known as the Waltham-Lowell system, was "unprecedented and revolutionary for its time". Not only was it faster and more efficient, it was considered more humane than the textile industry in Great Britain by "paying in cash, hiring young adults instead of children, and by offering employment for only a few years and providing educational opportunities to help workers ...
[2]: 41–42 The British textile industry used 52 million pounds of cotton in 1800, which increased to 588 million pounds in 1850. [45] The share of value added by the cotton textile industry in Britain was 2.6% in 1760, 17% in 1801, and 22.4% in 1831. Value added by the British woollen industry was 14.1% in 1801.
Competition grew in the domestic textile industry and wages declined, so workers began to go on strike. Resistance was led by the young women known as mill girls. With the mid-nineteenth-century growth in immigration and social changes post-Civil War, mill owners began to recruit immigrants, who often arrived with skills and were willing to ...
On October 13, 1845, civic leaders attempted to write to factory owners and convince them to change the industry's standards to 10-hour work days but they were unsuccessful in this effort. [8] It wasn't until mid-october that factories were reopened with about half of their normal number of workers. [8]
The Leader of the Luddites, 1812. Hand-coloured etching. The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of automated machinery due to concerns relating to worker pay and output quality. They often destroyed the machines in organised raids. Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of ...
The technology and information on how to build a textile industry were largely provided by Samuel Slater (1768–1835) who emigrated to New England in 1789. He had studied and worked in British textile mills for a number of years and immigrated to the United States, despite restrictions against it, to try his luck with U.S. manufacturers who ...
To these must be added bleach works, textile print works, and the engineering workshops and foundries, all serving the cotton industry. During the mid-19th century Manchester grew to become the centre of Lancashire's cotton industry and was dubbed "Cottonopolis", and a branch of the Bank of England was established in 1826. [citation needed]