Authors:
Historic Era: Era 6: The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1990 | Volume 41, Issue 1
Technology Transfer
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
On April 30, 1789, George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States on the balcony of New York’s Federal Hall, then serving as the new nation’s temporary capitol. Although it was one of the most important moments in his life, Washington, who had ordered up elegant clothes from London for many years, wore a simple brown suit with silver buttons, white stockings, and shoes with silver buckles. The hero of the Revolution had chosen his outfit with great care. Even at the very dawn of the Republic, politicians were conscious of symbolism, and Washington made certain that he was wearing a suit made of American cloth that had been woven in Hartford, Connecticut.
Washington’s purpose was to encourage American manufactures, as industrial goods were called in those days. Certainly they needed plenty of encouragement. Most manufactured goods, and nearly all quality cloth, were imported from Britain. The overwhelming majority of the American people lived on farms and made at home nearly everything they needed, from soap to furniture. They dressed mainly in homespun, a crude, loosely woven cloth made by housewives from yarn that they had, as the name implies, spun themselves. It was not much different from the fabric that had clothed medieval peasants.
Textile weaving is a technology so ancient that it predates history itself, and remnants of woven cloth have been found in the kitchen middens of Neolithic Europe. But, over the ensuing thousands of years, the technology changed little until the middle of the eighteenth century. Fibers of wool, flax, or cotton were washed and picked clean by hand. Then, they were carded to align the fibers, combed to straighten them further, drawn out a little at a time, and twisted into yarn by a spin- die or, from the 15th century on, a spinning wheel. Once the yarn was made, it could be woven on a loom into cloth. It was all an immensely labor-intensive process, and only the rich could afford cloth that was much better, to our eyes, than burlap. There was an active market in secondhand quality clothes (good clothes were so expensive and difficult to acquire that people frequently left them to relatives and friends in their wills along with furniture and land).
Then the Industrial Revolution began with the mechanization of the British textile industry. In 1733, John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which considerably increased the speed with which cloth could be woven. Still, the weavers could not work any faster than the spinners could supply the yarn. In 1768, Sir Richard Arkwright invented the water frame, a machine that, using waterpower, could spin many threads at one time. By 1777, Arkwright had 200 employees in his mill at Cromford, in Derbyshire, and six factories operating elsewhere.
At about that time the spinning jenny greatly increased the speed of home spinning. Other mechanical devices to speed the process of carding and combing came into use.