The use of tools 4

Kay's flying shuttle: 1733
In 1733 John Kay, son of the owner of a Lancashire woollen factory, patents the first of the devices which revolutionize the textile industry. He has devised a method for the shuttle to be thrown mechanically back and forth across the loom. This greatly speeds up the previous hand process, and it halves the labour force. Where a broad-cloth loom previously required a weaver on each side, it can now be worked by a single operator. Until this point the textile industry has required four spinners to service one weaver. Kay's innovation, in wide use by the 1750s, greatly increases this disparity. Either there must now be many more spinners, or spinning machines must achieve a similar increase in productivity.
James Watt and the condenser: 1764-1769
In 1764 a model of a Newcomen steam engine is brought for repair to the young James Watt, who is responsible for looking after the instruments in the physics department of the university of Glasgow. In restoring it to working order, he is astonished at how much steam it uses and wastes. The reason, he realizes, is that the machine's single cylinder is required to perform two opposing functions. It must receive the incoming steam at maximum pressure to force the piston up (for which it needs to be as hot as possible), and it must then condense the steam to form a vacuum to pull the cylinder down (for which it needs to be as cool as possible).
The solution occurs to Watt when he is walking near Glasgow one Sunday in May 1765. The two functions could be separated by providing a chamber, outside the cylinder but connecting with it, in which a jet of cold water will condense the steam and cause the vacuum. This chamber is the condenser, for which Watt registers a patent in 1769. The principle has remained an essential part of all subsequent steam engines. It is the first of three major improvements which Watt makes in the basic design of steam-driven machinery. The other two are the double-acting engine and the governor, developed in the 1780s.
Hargreaves' jenny and Crompton's mule: 1764-1779
An accident is said to have given a Lancashire spinner, James Hargreaves, the idea for the first mechanical improvement of the spinning process. In about 1764 he notices an overturned spinning wheel which continues to turn with the spindle vertical rather than horizontal. This gives him the idea that several spindles could be worked simultaneously from a wheel in this position. He develops a version with eight spindles for use by his own family, thus immediately raising their output eight times. News of this causes jealous local spinners to invade his house and smash his machines.
Hargreaves moves to Nottingham, where he sets up a small cotton-mill using his invention. It acquires the name of spinning jenny, traditionally explained as being the name of the daughter who gave Hargreaves the idea when she knocked over her spinning wheel. He patents his device in 1770. By the time of his death, in 1778, the latest versions of his machine work eighty spindles each - and there are said 20,000 jennies in use in the cottages and small factories of Britain. This is still an entirely hand-operated mechanism. The next essential development is the application of power. This is solved by Richard Arkwright, who takes out a patent for his machine in 1769.
Arkwright's innovation is in drawing out the cotton by means of rollers before it is twisted into yarn. He succeeds first with a machine worked by a horse, but two years later - in 1771 - he successfully applies water power, with the result that his invention becomes known as the water frame. It is in place just in time for an immense new expansion of the cotton industry after a high tax on pure-cotton fabrics (aimed at calicoes imported from India) is reduced in 1774. Arkwright's machines are suitable for spinning the strong yarn required for the warp of the woven cloth. They are less good at the finer material needed for the weft. Yet conversely, Hargreaves' spinning jenny is only suitable for the weft.
The technologies of Arkwright and Hargreaves therefore complement each other for a few years until the merits of each are combined by Samuel Crompton, a worker in a Lancashire spinning mill. In doing so he takes the final step in the spinning technology of the early Industrial Revolution. Crompton observes the tendency of the spinning jenny to break the yarn, and he resolves to improve this aspect of the process. He does so in a machine which he perfects in 1779.
Crompton's machine combines the principles of Hargreaves' jenny and of Arkwright's water frame. The name which it acquires - Crompton's mule - is a pun on that fact. As the offspring of a jenny (a female donkey) and of another creature, the new arrival is clearly a mule. Crompton's machine is capable of spinning almost every kind of yarn at considerable speed. The flying shuttle in the 1750s put pressure on the spinners to catch up. Now the mule challenges the weavers. They respond in 1785 with the first water-driven power loom, invented by Edmund Cartwright after visiting Arkwright's mills at Cromford. With all this technology in place, the pressure is now on the suppliers of raw cotton in America.
Ironbridge: 1779
In the space of a few months in 1779 the world's first iron bridge, with a single span of over 100 feet, is erected for Abraham Darby (the third of that name) over the Severn just downstream from Coalbrookdale. Work has gone on for some time in building the foundations and casting the huge curving ribs. But in this new technology little time need be spent in assembling the parts - which amount, it is proudly announced, to 378 tons 10 cwt. of metal. The lightness of the structure strikes all observers. An early visitor comments: 'though it seems like network wrought in iron, it will be uninjured for ages.' It is uninjured still. A great tradition, bringing marvels such as the Crystal Palace, begins in this industrial valley.
Machine tools, gun barrels and cylinders: 1774-1800
John Wilkinson, an ironmaster in Staffordshire and Shropshire, has been building up a lucrative arms trade. In 1774 he invents a machine, powered by a water wheel, which can drill with unprecedented accuracy through the length of a cast-iron cylinder to create the barrel of a cannon. It is a turning point in the development of machine tools. James Watt realizes that Wilkinson's new machine is capable of the precision required for an efficient steam-engine cylinder. In 1775 Wilkinson delivers to Birmingham the first of the thousands of cylinders he will bore for the firm of Boulton and Watt. Boulton finds them 'almost without error; that of 50 inches diameter doth not err the thickness of an old shilling' in any part.
The Boulton and Watt engine delivered to Wilkinson in the following year is intended for a new purpose. Instead of the usual pumping of water, it is to undertake a more sophisticated role - working the bellows which pump air into one of Wilkinson's blast furnaces of molten iron. The owners of the mills and mines of the young Industrial Revolution have many tasks to which a source of mechanical power, other than the traditional water of a mill race, could be usefully applied. They await with interest reports of this new type of engine. And the reports are good. By the time Watt's patent expires, in 1800, more than 500 Boulton and Watt engines have been installed around the country and abroad.
The increased efficiency of the new engines, compared with the previous Newcomen version, enables Boulton and Watt to charge by a novel and very profitable method. The machines are provided and installed free, and customers pay a royalty of one-third of the amount saved on fuel. One group of merchants interested in the Boulton and Watt machines, the London brewers, have no previous machine use for comparison. They present Watt with an interesting billing problem which results in the concept of Horsepower. From 1783 the saving (and the royalty) is even greater, because in that year Watt puts on the market another major innovation - his double-acting engine.
Double-acting engine and governor: 1782-1787
Just as James Watt applied a rational approach to improve the efficiency of the steam engine with the condenser, so now he takes a logical step forward in a modification patented in 1782. His new improvement is the double-acting engine. Watt observes that the steam is idle for half of each cycle. During the downward stroke, when the vacuum is exerting atmospheric force on the piston, the valve between boiler and cylinder is closed. Watt takes the simple step of diverting the steam during this part of the cycle to the upper part of the cylinder, where it joins with the atmospheric pressure in forcing the cylinder down - and thus doubles its effective action.
The most elegant contraption devised by Watt is in use from 1787. It is the governor - the first example of the type of controlling device required in industrial automation, and a feature of all steam engines since Watt's time. Watt's governor consists of two arms, hinged on a central pivot and rotated by the action of the steam engine. Each arm has a heavy ball at the end. As the speed increases, centrifugal force moves the balls and the arms outwards. This action narrows the aperture of a valve controlling the flow of steam to the engine. As the power is slowly cut off, the speed of the engine reduces and the balls subside nearer to the central column - thus slightly opening the valve again in a permanent process of adjustment.
Cotton gin: 1793
The mechanization of spinning and weaving in England, between 1733 and 1785, greatly speeds up the industrial process and rapidly leads to a shortage of cotton. During most of the century the bulk of raw cotton arriving at Liverpool for the Lancashire mills is from India. The cotton grown in the southern states of America is commercially less viable because it is short-fibred. The cotton fibres, which will be spun into cotton, have to be separated from the seeds which they protect and enmesh. This process, known as cotton picking, is done entirely by hand. The short fibres make it a slow and expensive task.
In 1793 Eli Whitney, a graduate of Yale, invents a machine which solves this problem. It consists of a hand-turned roller with projecting spikes. Each spike passes through a slot in a grid, wide enough to allow the spike to drag the cotton fibres through but too narrow for the cotton seeds to pass. They fall out into a separate container, while a revolving brush cleans the fibres, or lint, off the spikes. Whitney's machine immediately trebles the speed at which cotton can be ginned, with major effects on the economy of the southern states of America. About forty times as much cotton (now established as 'king cotton') is produced in 1810 as in 1793. Vast new areas are taken in hand as plantations. The demand for slaves increases accordingly

Pont Cysyllte: 1795-1805
In 1795 Thomas Telford applies cast-iron technology in a bold new context. In 1793 he has been appointed engineer and architect to the Shropshire Union canal, which is to link the Mersey with the Severn. Near Llangollen the proposed route crosses the Dee valley, which is more than 300 yards wide and drops down about 120 feet to the river level below. The number of locks needed to get a barge down and up again would represent a costly delay for the bargees. Yet an aqueduct of this height and length is a daunting project. The valley is much wider and deeper than the one spanned by Brindley in his heavily buttressed aqueduct at Barton. But Telford accepts the challenge.
Telford constructs at Pont Cysyllte what is in effect an enormous cast-iron gutter. Cast to the correct curves and then welded together, Telford's plates combine to form a channel which is nearly 12 feet wide, with a path alongside for the carthorse. The metal is much lighter than the thick layer of pounded clay and sand used by Brindley to contain the water of the Bridgewater canal. So Telford's aqueduct can be a slender structure of nineteen tall stone arches. Pont Cysyyllte is ready for the first barge to make the journey across the valley in 1805. Walter Scott describes it as 'the most impressive work of art' which he has ever seen.
The roads of Telford and McAdam: 1803-1815
Improvement in the speed of coaches, seen in Britain with the introduction of the mail coach in 1784, is accompanied by similar advances in road technology. Travel in horse-drawn vehicles becomes increasingly sophisticated during a period of about fifty years, until the success of the railways results once again in roads being neglected. The early decades of the 19th century are the great days of coaching, commemorated in many paintings and prints. Clear evidence of this new priority is the government's appointment of Thomas Telford in 1803 to undertake extensive public works in his native Scotland.
Telford constructs more than 900 miles of road in Scotland, together with 120 bridges, before transferring his attention to the important route along the north coast of Wales (leading to Anglesey and the shipping lanes to Ireland). With justification Robert Southey describes Telford as the Colossus of Roads. Meanwhile another Scot, John McAdam, has been making great improvements in the surface quality of the new roads. He devises a system, first put into practice in the Bristol region in 1815, for improving the durability of a carriage way.
A McAdam road is well drained and is raised slightly above ground level. McAdam achieves this by laying three successive layers of graded stones, with the largest ones at the bottom. Each layer is compacted by a very simple method. The road is opened to traffic for several weeks, until the metal-rimmed wheels of carriages and carts have compressed and levelled the stones sufficiently for the next layer, of a finer grade, to be added. Roads made by this method come to be known all over the world as macadamized. When tar is added to bind the top layer, later in the 19th century, the result is the tar macadam road - and eventually the trade name 'tarmac'.
Glass, iron and prefabrication: 1837-1851
The public first becomes aware of the glorious potential of cast-iron architecture in the 1840s, when extraordinary conservatories are erected at Chatsworth and in Kew Gardens. But the technology derives from factory construction in the 1790s. With Boulton and Watt's steam machinery in operation, conventional factories using timber for joists and floors are prone to disastrous fires. The occasional use of cast iron for structural purposes goes back many centuries in China, for temple pagodas, but it is an innovation in Britain when William Strutt builds the first fireproof mill at Derby, in 1792-3, with floors on shallow brick arches supported on cast-iron pillars.
Strutt's mill still contains some massive wooden beams, but an entirely wood-free factory is constructed at Ditherington, near Shrewsbury, in 1796-7. Arched brick floors, on cast-iron beams and pillars, become the standard factory and warehouse interior of the 19th century. The next and most glamorous stage in cast-iron architecture is linked above all with the name of Joseph Paxton. As superintendent of the duke of Devonshire's gardens at Chatsworth, he builds there in 1837-40 a great conservatory, shaped like a tent (277 feet long and 67 feet high) but consisting entirely of cast iron and glass.
In a ducal garden this building is not much visited, but it astonishes all who see it. Queen Victoria notes in her diary in 1842 that it is 'the most stupendous and extraordinary creation imaginable'. Two years later a similar building is commissioned from Richard Turner and Decimus Burton for the royal gardens at Kew. Since 1841 these gardens have been open to the public, so the beauty of the Palm House, completed in 1848, becomes more widely known than the Chatsworth conservatory. But it is Paxton's building for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the astonishing Crystal Palace, which reveals to the millions the potential of the new architecture.
The Crystal Palace is gigantic compared to its predecessors in cast iron and glass. It is five times as long as the Palm House in Kew and nearly twice as high; or, put another way, it is longer than the palace of Versailles and higher than Westminster Abbey. But even more significant is the famous speed of its design (one week of detailed drawing, after a preliminary jotting by Paxton on a piece of blotting paper) and of its construction (six months). The reason, and the reason for its lasting architectural significance, is that Paxton's building is the first thoroughgoing example of prefabricated architecture (a concept perfectly suited to cast iron, and pioneered seventy years earlier for the bridge at Coalbrookdale).
The statistics of the Crystal Palace are bewildering (3300 iron columns, 2150 iron girders, 250 miles of sash bar, 293,635 panes of glass), but the crucial detail is that these all conform to a basic 24-foot module. The manufacture of the pieces can be subcontracted to several foundries and glass factories; assembly on site is like putting together a giant's dolls' house. Hence the fact that this palace of glass is created, from scratch, in less than 200 days. As if to emphasize the point, it is dismantled in 1852 and moved to another site at Sydenham - where it stands until its contents catch fire in 1936. The modular steel-frame tradition of late 20th-century architecture has in this building its most distinguished ancestor.
This History is as yet incomplete.