Industry changes the world

Great Britain – 1730. Agriculture has never been as efficient as it is now. Aggregating small strips of land into large fields, enclosure, allows better use of the land. Horses now pull the ploughs that in the past were pulled by people. Fewer farm workers are needed to produce the same amounts of food stuffs as before.

With improved breeding, cows give more milk. Pigs grow faster and get bigger and sheep give more wool. It’s possible to get much more food than before. The improvements in agriculture caused the population to grow. At the same time, many British farm workers become unemployed.

Therefore, many people move to the cities where they can find work in the new and growing textile industry. Whether you’re a king or a peasant, you need textiles. With textiles - cloth - we make clothes. People have done this for more than 5000 years, but new breeds of sheep give more wool to make even more cloth. And it is textile manufacturing that prompts people to invent machines.

In order to increase the production of textiles, someone called John Kay invents the flying shuttle. With this, one person can produce as much cloth as 2 to 4 people could before. But suddenly, there isn’t enough yarn to keep up. The wool can’t be spun into yarn as fast as the looms can weave it into cloth. So, in 1764, someone named Hargreaves invents a machine that can spin yarn, called the Spinning Jenny.

A Spinning Jenny machine can make as much yarn as 4 to 6 workers and it never needs to take a rest. The result is that those who have been spinning yarn, the hand spinners become unemployed because of the Spinning Jenny. Angry hand spinners storm into the inventor Hargreaves’ home in Blackburn and wreck his machines. Hargreaves moves to Nottingham. And before long, there are 20,000 Spinning Jennies in Britain.

This is the first known protest against machine stealing people’s jobs, but it is not the last. In 1769, another spinning machine is invented by hairdresser and wigmaker Richard Arkwright. This one is water powered and therefore needs to be near running water. Using water power to drive machines is a huge step in the industrial revolution. Before, it was an option to put your machines and workers in a factory, but now, it’s a necessity.

It is commonly claimed that Arkwright invented the factory. The first big step in the industrial revolution was to organize the work. The building of factories is the second big step. After this, a series of new inventions are introduced which make the textile factories more efficient. And soon, a weaving loom is invented which doesn’t even need to be operated by workers: a mechanical loom.

Now, it’s possible to mass produce textiles, but there isn’t enough wool. So, people begin using cotton from the USA. Soon, cotton fabrics will become more common than wool. The new machines make work more efficient, but at the same time, steal the workers’ ability to make a living. If one machine can do the work of three people, but only needs one to operate it, two will become jobless.

Now that machines do most of the work, it’s no longer essential for a worker to be skilled. Before machines began to be used, it was the hand workers who possessed the knowledge of how to make cloth and other artifacts. Now, the factory owners possess the knowledge of how things are made, and it’s they who organize how the work happens in the factories. This is the third big step in the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution starts in Britain, but very quickly spreads to country after country.