Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the tech are you. It's time for a
Speaker 1: classic episode, and this one is going to be the
Speaker 1: first of three because it was a topic that was
Speaker 1: so big I had to divide it up into three
Speaker 1: separate episodes. It is how the Industrial Revolution worked. This
Speaker 1: is part one, which originally published on November two thousand. Enjoy.
Speaker 1: So typically we think of the Industrial Revolution as a
Speaker 1: period in which automation, mass production, urbanization, all of these
Speaker 1: things change the way that we humans live. And it's
Speaker 1: a time in which corporations came into being and we
Speaker 1: started to see the delineation of work between laborers and management,
Speaker 1: and the rise of unions and all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 1: But it's even more complex than that, and the story
Speaker 1: doesn't have a clear beginning, middle, and end, which is
Speaker 1: problematic because we humans like stories that have a clear narrative.
Speaker 1: But as you guys know, history rarely follows that pattern.
Speaker 1: So before we can even talk about the Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 1: we need to see why it was such a big deal,
Speaker 1: which requires that we look way, way way back. And
Speaker 1: when I say way back, I'm talking about the Neolithic Revolution.
Speaker 1: There are two big revolutions of human behavior and uh
Speaker 1: and and various things around that that have shaped the
Speaker 1: way we human beings exist here on the planet. The
Speaker 1: Neolithic Revolution was the first one, and this took place
Speaker 1: thousands of years ago, like somewhere between nine thousand and
Speaker 1: seven thousand BC. That was pretty much when this was
Speaker 1: taking place. That's when he Winds began to discover agricultural
Speaker 1: techniques and we began to transition from hunter gatherer lifestyles
Speaker 1: where you're very nomadic and you're depending upon finding the
Speaker 1: food you need day to day, to an agrarian lifestyle
Speaker 1: where you're actually cultivating food in both crops and livestock.
Speaker 1: People began to settle down, and the vast majority of
Speaker 1: people were farmers. So most people, in fact, the vast
Speaker 1: majority of people were spending their days out in fields,
Speaker 1: you know, tending to crops or livestock. Now, the term
Speaker 1: revolution gives you a couple of implications, and they can
Speaker 1: be a little misleading. Actually, it implies that we're talking
Speaker 1: about a moment of abrupt change in history. But that's
Speaker 1: not really the case with either the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions.
Speaker 1: These things took a lot of time. Now, the Neolithic
Speaker 1: Revolution took a great deal of time, we're talking about
Speaker 1: a thousand years. But generally speaking, historians bracket the Industrial
Speaker 1: real Revolution as a period in history that began in
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty and ended around eighteen fifty in Britain. Europe
Speaker 1: and the United States and some other areas followed suit
Speaker 1: in timelines that kind of overlapped Britain's timeline, but Britain
Speaker 1: got the jump on everybody else. It really got started
Speaker 1: in Britain. Now, seventeen sixty to eighteen fifty, that is
Speaker 1: just one decade short of a full century, and the
Speaker 1: seeds for the revolution were actually planted centuries before that.
Speaker 1: So we need to look at the sixteenth century, the
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred's, the Late Renaissance to kind of get an
Speaker 1: idea of the sort of things that led up to
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution. And that was a time when philosophy
Speaker 1: was transforming into science. It's when people began to learn
Speaker 1: more about how the world works and how to make
Speaker 1: practical use of the knowledge they gained. We had really
Speaker 1: important thinkers like Francis Bacon, John Locke, Galileo Galilei, Aruke Spinoza,
Speaker 1: Renee des Cartes, and even earlier thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci,
Speaker 1: all of whom made significant contributions to human knowledge and philosophy. Now,
Speaker 1: these were the ideas that fueled the Renaissance and led
Speaker 1: into the Age of Enlightenment. And it's also important to
Speaker 1: point out that the Industrial Revolution wasn't just about technology.
Speaker 1: It was marked by changes in demographics and culture, in
Speaker 1: socioeconomic conditions, agriculture, manufacturing, and shrade. There were a lot
Speaker 1: of conditions in place that allowed this transformation to happen
Speaker 1: in England specifically. In general, we're looking at the time
Speaker 1: in history when people began to leave the pastoral farms
Speaker 1: and head into cities to earn a living. Uh The
Speaker 1: term industrial revolution revolution was popularized by a nineteenth century
Speaker 1: English economic historian named Arnold Toynbee. He popularized the term
Speaker 1: industrial revolution, and he originally defined it as seventeen sixty
Speaker 1: to eighteen forty, but other historians would begin to expand
Speaker 1: that outward, looking at a broader range of years to
Speaker 1: define the Industrial Revolution. They did identify a few trends
Speaker 1: as being fundamental for the Industrial Revolution to take place,
Speaker 1: and one of those very important elements was that populations
Speaker 1: were growing throughout Europe. We were starting to see more
Speaker 1: and more people being born in Europe at the time,
Speaker 1: and it also meant that there were more people available
Speaker 1: to do work, and also that there was an increasing
Speaker 1: need to produce more food and clothing for everybody. And
Speaker 1: as you have probably heard in your lifetimes, necessity is
Speaker 1: the mother of invention. If you need something, someone's eventually
Speaker 1: going to come up with an idea of how to
Speaker 1: meet that need, or you go without. Now this challengement
Speaker 1: that many people worked hard on ways to overcome the
Speaker 1: increase in need for clothing, food, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: And in Britain there were quite a few inventive people
Speaker 1: who designed machinery and systems to really meet those needs.
Speaker 1: And it also didn't hurt that England had a really
Speaker 1: healthy agricultural system with lots of farms spread throughout the country.
Speaker 1: It was really the right place in the right time
Speaker 1: for change to happen. And before the Industrial Revolution, most
Speaker 1: people were making whatever they needed for themselves, or they
Speaker 1: would inherit some things from parents or other family members,
Speaker 1: and only occasionally would they buy something from another person
Speaker 1: or trade for it. It was pretty rare. There are
Speaker 1: certain certain um occupations that lent themselves to working well
Speaker 1: in this environment, but generally speaking, we're still talking mostly farmers.
Speaker 1: There really wasn't much of a middle class to speak
Speaker 1: of before the Industrial Revolution. There were men and women
Speaker 1: who specialized in certain crafts like carpentry or stonework, but
Speaker 1: most people just made do with what they had, and
Speaker 1: that was partly because the cost of produce seeing goods
Speaker 1: was quite high. It required a lot of labor, a
Speaker 1: lot of hard work by hand, and it also was
Speaker 1: not easy to get raw materials or to ship finished
Speaker 1: goods from one place to another. It was just pretty
Speaker 1: challenging to make something and deliberate. On top of that,
Speaker 1: Europe was emerging from a socioeconomic system in which there
Speaker 1: were really three main classes of people. You had the nobility,
Speaker 1: including the royalty. You had the clergy, so everyone involved
Speaker 1: with the church and pretty much everybody else. Now. The
Speaker 1: nobility and clergy wielded power in different contexts. Sometimes those
Speaker 1: contexts overlapped. Sometimes certain branches of the clergy were in
Speaker 1: power or not in power, particularly in England, where you
Speaker 1: had Protestants and Catholics kind of shifting the balance of
Speaker 1: power throughout the several hundred years from uh the King
Speaker 1: Henry the eighth era up to the Industrial Revolution. But
Speaker 1: by seventeen fifty things had changed a lot and a
Speaker 1: century earlier, around the sixteen fifties sixteen forties, really England
Speaker 1: had gone through a civil war in which the monarchy
Speaker 1: was originally abolished. Uh. Then England was a protectorate for
Speaker 1: a little while, and then England reinstated the monarchy, but
Speaker 1: with some big changes. So essentially what happened was you
Speaker 1: had Parliament originally saying, you know, we don't think kings
Speaker 1: are such a great idea, and sorry, Charles, we're gonna
Speaker 1: get rid of you. We're gonna chuck you and your
Speaker 1: head out, and we're gonna replace you with a parliament
Speaker 1: that will govern the country, and we're gonna put Oliver
Speaker 1: Cromwell as the Lord Protector of England sort of the
Speaker 1: head of this parliamentary body. Then after a while, uh,
Speaker 1: some shifting political conditions prompted Parliament to say, you know what,
Speaker 1: we kind of like it when we had a king
Speaker 1: that was kind of awesome. We should we should do
Speaker 1: that at in We'll be back with more about the
Speaker 1: early years of the Industrial Revolution right after this break.
Speaker 1: So England reinstated the monarchy, but in the process Parliament
Speaker 1: also wanted to make sure the monarch didn't have as
Speaker 1: much power, so they underwent kind of another transformation, something
Speaker 1: similar to what had happened when King John had to
Speaker 1: sign the Magna Carta back in the thirteenth century. The
Speaker 1: monarch and the House of Lords saw much of their
Speaker 1: power stripped away, and Parliament's House of Commons had a
Speaker 1: greater share of the power. The reason I even bring
Speaker 1: this up, and you might be saying, well, this is
Speaker 1: a technology podcast. This isn't stuff you missed in history class.
Speaker 1: Where are you talking about it? Well, the important part
Speaker 1: is that this was the decline of nobility in England.
Speaker 1: They were starting to see less and less power in
Speaker 1: their grasp. They were no longer as a effective as
Speaker 1: they once were. There was instead a rise of a
Speaker 1: new class, a middle class emerging at the time, and
Speaker 1: you had merchants who were making a great deal of
Speaker 1: money and in many cases were much more powerful than
Speaker 1: nobles who might have a noble title, but not as
Speaker 1: much money as the merchants did, so we started to
Speaker 1: see a shift in power, and that condition was very
Speaker 1: important for the Industrial Revolution to take place too. Now,
Speaker 1: among the merchants were some pretty interesting inventors, people who
Speaker 1: came up with new ways to make work more efficient.
Speaker 1: And one inventor's work that we need to talk about
Speaker 1: pre dates the Industrial Revolution by a few decades, but
Speaker 1: without his contributions nothing would be the same. So back
Speaker 1: in seventeen o nine, just a few decades before the
Speaker 1: official Industrial Revolution, there was an iron master named Abraham Darby,
Speaker 1: and Darby sussed out how to smelt iron using coke
Speaker 1: as a fuel. Coke in this case, by the way,
Speaker 1: doesn't refer to a tasty soft drink. I live in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: and here coke it means. It means Coca cola. But
Speaker 1: that's not what I'm talking about when you're looking at
Speaker 1: smelting iron. Instead, I'm talking about a fuel that has
Speaker 1: a very high carbon content. And there are a few
Speaker 1: different types of coke, but the one that concerns us
Speaker 1: in the context of the Industrial Revolution was made from coal. Now,
Speaker 1: to make coke, you would put coal in an airless
Speaker 1: furnace or an oven, and you would bake it at
Speaker 1: really high temperatures, and during that process there would be
Speaker 1: ash that would form and it would fuse with the
Speaker 1: carbon inside the coal, and after you're done baking it,
Speaker 1: you end up with this kind of porous gray fuel
Speaker 1: solid fuel, and if you burn it, it creates no smoke,
Speaker 1: but it does release carbon monoxide. So why was Darby's
Speaker 1: discovery such a big deal in the first place. Well
Speaker 1: before he had found a way to use coke as
Speaker 1: a fuel to smelt iron ore into pig iron, everyone
Speaker 1: was using charcoal. Charcoal is made by burning wood, which
Speaker 1: meant that iron works had to be located near or
Speaker 1: inside forests, and it made it hard to access the
Speaker 1: iron works, and it also led to deforestation. But England
Speaker 1: had a steady supply of coal and iron ore, which
Speaker 1: meant it was well poised to use this material in
Speaker 1: lots of new ways. In the eighteenth century, the region
Speaker 1: northwest of Birmingham along the Southern River became the center
Speaker 1: for iron works in the early Industrial Revolution. Iron working
Speaker 1: would also become very important in other parts of the
Speaker 1: United Kingdom, such as Scotland. Now, in the next episode,
Speaker 1: i'll talk more about the iron industry and how that
Speaker 1: guided England's development. But the important thing to remember is
Speaker 1: that iron was a vital material during the Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 1: and dar Rby's discovery would literally fuel it once it
Speaker 1: caught on. During Darby's own lifetime, however, most iron working
Speaker 1: facilities continue to rely upon charcoal for fuel, so it's
Speaker 1: only later that others recognize the value of adopting Darby's approach.
Speaker 1: And that's why, even though his his discovery predates the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution, it took a few decades for it to
Speaker 1: really play a major role in the iron working industry.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of why we don't don't include that
Speaker 1: in the Industrial Revolution itself. But as the iron and
Speaker 1: coal industries grew, so too did the textile industry in England.
Speaker 1: And that's really kind of the first place we can
Speaker 1: look at, the first the first factor of the Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 1: We can look at and see how um advances in
Speaker 1: technology dramatically changed the way industry worked in England. So
Speaker 1: I'm going to focus on textiles or pretty much the
Speaker 1: rest of this episode. The growth of the textile industry
Speaker 1: was helped by a couple of really important geographic features.
Speaker 1: One is that Britain is an island, and as an island,
Speaker 1: it's got a lot of coastline, which means that there's
Speaker 1: lots of opportunity for people to build large ports cities.
Speaker 1: One of them, Liverpool served as an important port for
Speaker 1: the textile trade. They would bring in cotton from the
Speaker 1: American colonies and also from India, and they would end
Speaker 1: up taking that cotton and moving it over to spinners
Speaker 1: and weavers, and then when textiles were done, they could
Speaker 1: ship the finished cloth off to other locations, whether that
Speaker 1: be in England or Europe, or even back to America.
Speaker 1: This was one of those things where UH England would
Speaker 1: take in raw materials from the American colonies, turn it
Speaker 1: into a finished product and then sell it back to
Speaker 1: the American colonies. UH. The region of Lancashire became known
Speaker 1: for producing cotton goods in particular. So why was Lancashire
Speaker 1: ideal for textiles? The main reason is that the climate
Speaker 1: in Lancashire is wet and that makes it easier to
Speaker 1: work with cotton fibers because as cotton fibers dry out,
Speaker 1: they become brittle, and Lancashire was several had also has
Speaker 1: several fast flowing streams, which made it ideal for constructing
Speaker 1: water powered cotton mills a little bit later on in
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution. Now, some of the inventions that made
Speaker 1: the textile industry possible in England require a bit of explanation,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna do some tech stuff. How stuff works
Speaker 1: classic descriptions here. So the first one we need to
Speaker 1: talk about is an invention created by a weaver named
Speaker 1: John k It's a device that he made in seventeen
Speaker 1: thirty three and it's called a flying shuttle, which made
Speaker 1: weaving wide bands of cloth much more efficient for weavers,
Speaker 1: and it makes you wonder what the heck of flying
Speaker 1: shuttle is. So to do that, we have to start
Speaker 1: off with talking about looms. A loop m is essentially
Speaker 1: just a device for weaving and a weave. If you
Speaker 1: ever look very closely at woven cloth, you'll see there
Speaker 1: are threads that are in vertical lines and threads that
Speaker 1: are in horizontal lines, and they weave between one another.
Speaker 1: So to make a weave, you would use a loom
Speaker 1: to hold the threads of one direction. So let's say vertically. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's say that it's just a simple loom where you've
Speaker 1: got a frame and you have this this thread called
Speaker 1: the warp that is threaded up and down on the frame,
Speaker 1: so you've got odd and even numbered threads, and then
Speaker 1: you would take a second thread to go in a
Speaker 1: horizontal direction. This would be the weft, and you would
Speaker 1: weave that back and forth under and over alternating strings. So,
Speaker 1: starting with the odd numbers, let's say that you do uh.
Speaker 1: String number one you go over, and string number two
Speaker 1: you go under, and string number three you go over.
Speaker 1: So for all the odd numbers you would go over,
Speaker 1: all the even numbers you would go under, and one
Speaker 1: full pass of that is called a pick. So if
Speaker 1: you were doing this on a very simple loom, where
Speaker 1: really you just have the strings there and you're doing
Speaker 1: all this by hand, it takes a while because you
Speaker 1: have to weave the the the weft back and forth
Speaker 1: through all the strings. But gradually, there were some looms
Speaker 1: that use some moving parts that made this a lot easier.
Speaker 1: One used warp frames, where you would you would actually
Speaker 1: put two different sets of warp thread on these warp frames.
Speaker 1: One set would be all the odd uh odd threads
Speaker 1: and one set would be all the even threads. So
Speaker 1: imagine that it's almost like a sandwich in a way.
Speaker 1: You've got one set of these threads. Let's say that's
Speaker 1: the odd ones that are laying more or less flat
Speaker 1: in respect to you, and then the other one is
Speaker 1: actually vertic coal. Uh, these will be the even threads.
Speaker 1: If you just passed your weft the horizontal line of
Speaker 1: threads straight across, and then you would use pedals to
Speaker 1: swap the positions of those two frames, and you know,
Speaker 1: they just they just passed between each other, and then
Speaker 1: you pull the weft back across the other way. This
Speaker 1: would have at the same effect as weaving the thread
Speaker 1: up and down across those uh, those those vertical threads,
Speaker 1: but you're doing it much much faster. Um. However, if
Speaker 1: you are working by yourself, you pretty much were limited
Speaker 1: to doing of cloth about as wide as your arm.
Speaker 1: Beyond that you would need a second weaver to help
Speaker 1: you out. Until John k came up with this flying shuttle,
Speaker 1: and uh, that ends up making a huge difference. It
Speaker 1: speeds up the weaving process significantly. So, by the way,
Speaker 1: the prod this of weaving is a little more complicated
Speaker 1: than just that. After you do a pick, you know,
Speaker 1: after you pass the weft through the warp, then you
Speaker 1: have to use a part of the loom called the
Speaker 1: red to batten the fabric. Now, a reed is like
Speaker 1: a comb and it is on the far side of
Speaker 1: where you're bringing the weft through the warp, and you
Speaker 1: use it to pull the new weft hard against the
Speaker 1: the previously woven cloth to pack it together to batten
Speaker 1: it down. And you have to batten that thread after
Speaker 1: each pass. And so this is pretty painstaking and obviously
Speaker 1: if you're doing it by hand, it's really slow work.
Speaker 1: And if you're all by yourself, like I said, you're
Speaker 1: limited to that arms width of of cloth because otherwise
Speaker 1: you would not be able to pass the shuttle that's
Speaker 1: the device that actually holds the weft thread from one
Speaker 1: side to the other. Now Kay's invention solved all that.
Speaker 1: The flying shuttle reduced the number of weavers needed for
Speaker 1: widecloth to just one. And here's how it worked. Imagine
Speaker 1: you've got these two frames of vertical lines of thread, uh,
Speaker 1: and all the odd lines of thread are on one frame,
Speaker 1: all the even lines are on the second frame. Those
Speaker 1: two frames can move so that the shuttle can pass
Speaker 1: easily between the two sets. Moving the shuttle from one
Speaker 1: side to the other completes one line of the weave.
Speaker 1: Then you bring the frames together, pull the horizontal thread
Speaker 1: and tightly using that red comb so it's packed against
Speaker 1: its processors. Then you switch which frame is up and
Speaker 1: which frame is down, and you pass it again. Just
Speaker 1: like I said, but case shuttle had wheels on it,
Speaker 1: and it allowed it to roll quickly in a channel
Speaker 1: between the two sets of of threads, the two sets
Speaker 1: of warp threads on the frames. You would pull a
Speaker 1: rope and this would make the shuttles quickly roll from
Speaker 1: one side to the other, like left or right or
Speaker 1: right to left. So you pull the rope, the shuttles
Speaker 1: zooms across left or right. You swap the position of
Speaker 1: the frames and well, first you batten that weft uh
Speaker 1: and swap the position of the frames, and you pull
Speaker 1: the rope and it zips across the other side, and
Speaker 1: you repeat this process. And it really sped things up.
Speaker 1: And that was just the first of several inventions that
Speaker 1: made it easier and less expensive to produce cloth, particularly
Speaker 1: large amounts of cloth. We'll be talking about the industrial
Speaker 1: revolution a bit more, but first let's take a quick
Speaker 1: break for these commercials. Alright, So the flying shuttle sped
Speaker 1: up weaving significantly. But now there was a new bottleneck
Speaker 1: in the textile industry, which was making yarn. Weavers could
Speaker 1: go through yarn faster than yarn could be spun. Yarn
Speaker 1: would be made by people called spinners. Traditionally, they would
Speaker 1: use spinning wheels, and normally you would need up to
Speaker 1: four spinners to port one weaver just to make yarn
Speaker 1: fast enough for the weaver to be effective. But this
Speaker 1: flying shuttle made the weavers even more efficient, so you
Speaker 1: needed more than four spinners just to be able to
Speaker 1: produce enough yarn for the weaver to stay active, And
Speaker 1: so the supply couldn't meet up with the weaving speeds,
Speaker 1: and that was an issue. Meanwhile, let's let's talk about
Speaker 1: spinning wheels. It's another interesting technology. Spinning wheels twist fibers
Speaker 1: into yarn, and I could do an entire episode on
Speaker 1: this process. I could probably get someone like Holly from
Speaker 1: Stuff You Missed in History class to talk about it too,
Speaker 1: But in general, here's how it works. You've got a
Speaker 1: large spinning wheel. You've probably seen pictures of these, But
Speaker 1: the large wheel provides the rotational force for a smaller
Speaker 1: component called a flyer. So the flyers kind of like
Speaker 1: a cylinder. Imagine a cylinder on its side. It's in
Speaker 1: the same plane of rotation as the spinning wheel. But
Speaker 1: you then connect the two with a drive band. Um
Speaker 1: it looks a lot like any kind of belt you
Speaker 1: would imagine for connecting gears together. So in this case,
Speaker 1: the large wheel would be a big gear. The flyer
Speaker 1: is a smaller gear. So as the large wheel rotates,
Speaker 1: the band connecting it to the flyer makes the flyer
Speaker 1: rotate as well. But since the flyer is smaller than
Speaker 1: the big wheel, it's making more rotations per minute than
Speaker 1: the big wheel. Uh. And most flyers actually have a
Speaker 1: section of different grooves the drive band can fit into,
Speaker 1: and each section is a different circumference, meaning you can
Speaker 1: adjust the speed of rotation or the ratio of rotation
Speaker 1: I should say, of the flyer. So it may be
Speaker 1: that one rotation of the big wheel is the same
Speaker 1: as five rotations of the flyer. But then you can
Speaker 1: swap the band to a different groove that would be
Speaker 1: slightly smaller, like it would be a smaller circumference around
Speaker 1: the flyer, and then one rotation of the big wheel
Speaker 1: might be seven, and rotations of the flyer and then
Speaker 1: you could move to maybe an even smaller circumference groove
Speaker 1: on the flyer, and one rotation of the big wheel
Speaker 1: would be the same as eleven rotations on the flyer.
Speaker 1: If you're having trouble imagining this, it's a lot like
Speaker 1: bike gears or even a transmission. That gear ratio is
Speaker 1: what determines the speed of rotation between two different rotating objects.
Speaker 1: So it's pretty interesting stuff that this was something that
Speaker 1: was important well before there wherever bicycles or cars um now.
Speaker 1: The flyer also contains a device called a bobbin. Bobbin
Speaker 1: is the thing that yarn winds around during yarn making.
Speaker 1: The bobbing itself is perched on a spindle. This would
Speaker 1: be the thing that sleeping Beauty pokes her finger on
Speaker 1: and goes unconscious due to that. So you put the
Speaker 1: bobbin on a spindle that allows usually allows the bobbin
Speaker 1: to rotate freely around the spindle, so the spindle is
Speaker 1: almost like an axle and it allows yarn to wind
Speaker 1: around it. The purpose for the rotation of this device,
Speaker 1: by the way, isn't just to pull on fiber or
Speaker 1: to wind it around the bobbin. It also creates a
Speaker 1: twist in the fibers themselves, and it's that twist that
Speaker 1: turns the fibers into yarn. Traditional spinning wheels have both
Speaker 1: the drive wheel and the bobbin along that same plane,
Speaker 1: meaning that the rotation is uh is in the same
Speaker 1: direction for the two. And it also meant that you
Speaker 1: were limited to one bobbin and one strand of yarn
Speaker 1: in the original spinning wheels. But then along came a
Speaker 1: guy named James Hargreaves who invented something called the spinning
Speaker 1: Jenny in sevent sixty four. Spinning Jenny. So what happened was,
Speaker 1: according to Hargreaves, he came up with this idea when
Speaker 1: one of his daughters accidentally tipped over a spinning wheel,
Speaker 1: and so hard Greaves, when he looked at the spinning
Speaker 1: wheel that was now on its side, notice that the
Speaker 1: bobbin was continuing to turn even it was now ninety
Speaker 1: degrees out of alignment of its usual plane. And then
Speaker 1: it occurred to him that if he were to change
Speaker 1: the rotation of this where you use this vertical approach
Speaker 1: to bobbin's instead of a horizontal approach, you could end
Speaker 1: up driving multiple spindles with a single wheel. You could
Speaker 1: do this and make lots of different yarns all at
Speaker 1: the same time, different different strands of yarn. And uh,
Speaker 1: he did make such a device. He created one and
Speaker 1: it was able to feed yarn to eight spindles at
Speaker 1: a time, which meant that you could produce eight times
Speaker 1: the yarn in the same amount of time it would
Speaker 1: normally take a spinner to do one. Uh. This is amazing.
Speaker 1: He's produced He's increased productivity by eight times. You keep
Speaker 1: in mind, remember I said a weaver typically would need
Speaker 1: four spinners to support the weaver's abilities. Now you have
Speaker 1: a possible, uh, a device that make a spinner create
Speaker 1: eight spindles of yarn. So technically one spinner could support
Speaker 1: two weavers under that system. And it made quite a
Speaker 1: stir in his community, so much so that spinners who
Speaker 1: were worried about their jobs broke into his house and
Speaker 1: smashed the machine to pieces. But you can't stop progress.
Speaker 1: Once something's invented, it's gonna pretty much stay invented. And
Speaker 1: it became much easier to make yarn from either wool
Speaker 1: or cotton using the spinning jenny. So this this pulling
Speaker 1: and twisting of fibers works with both wool and with cotton.
Speaker 1: You can do this to to create the yarn. By
Speaker 1: the time of hargreaves death in seventy eight, there were
Speaker 1: versions of the spinning Jenny that could feed up to
Speaker 1: eighties spindles simultaneously, but these devices still required human power
Speaker 1: to work, typically relying on a treadle system, So trundle
Speaker 1: being like a pedal that you use your foot to
Speaker 1: two power you. You'd rock your foot back and forth,
Speaker 1: kind of like old sewing machines too. In order to
Speaker 1: create this rotational uh force, There'd be a there'd be
Speaker 1: a piston essentially, or or a stick really attached to
Speaker 1: one end of the treadle and around the hub of
Speaker 1: one of the big wheel, and as you tilt the
Speaker 1: treadle back and forth, it would cause the wheel to rotate. Now,
Speaker 1: because this required human power, it still meant that things
Speaker 1: were a little slow, and that you eventually would have
Speaker 1: to take breaks because people need rest. But all that
Speaker 1: began to change when Richard Arkwright patented a machine in
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty nine that drew out cotton by passing the
Speaker 1: fibers through rollers before moving on to the yarn making process.
Speaker 1: So he created a device where rollers would essentially squish
Speaker 1: this fiber and make it faster to produce yarn. His
Speaker 1: original machine used horses to provide the power, so it
Speaker 1: literally ran on horse power. But in seventeen seventy one
Speaker 1: he yeared out how to upgrade the system using water power.
Speaker 1: Now that created the opportunity for textile mills to grow,
Speaker 1: becoming mills water powered cotton mills and harnessing those stream
Speaker 1: powers of England to draw fiber from cotton and make
Speaker 1: yarn and then weave it into cloth ar great was
Speaker 1: incredibly successful. You would eventually employ around five thousand people
Speaker 1: and he even received a knighthood in seventies six first
Speaker 1: contributions to English industry. Now, Hargreaves approach was suitable for
Speaker 1: creating the weft for a weaver. That's that long thread
Speaker 1: that you use on the shuttle. So this is the
Speaker 1: horizontal threads. If you think of the vertical threads as
Speaker 1: the ones that are at touched to the frame. This
Speaker 1: is the thread you pass back and forth over and
Speaker 1: over again. Has to be really long because each time
Speaker 1: it passes, you know you still need to have more
Speaker 1: thread to complete the weaving. So our Great's invention was
Speaker 1: was really good at creating the fiber for the warp,
Speaker 1: and hargreaves His invention was really great eight for creating
Speaker 1: the fiber for the weft. These are two different types
Speaker 1: of of yarn in this case like it just was
Speaker 1: more suitable for one application versus the other. Now that
Speaker 1: meant that by combining the spinning Jenny and Arkwright's machine,
Speaker 1: you could create both types of yarn, and it ended
Speaker 1: up increasing the speed of yarn making. It was a
Speaker 1: huge jump ahead. So now the textile industry is really
Speaker 1: taking off. Another inventor named Samuel Crompton would improve upon
Speaker 1: the spinning Jenny. He invented a new spinning machine in
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy nine. His machine was called the Crompton's Mule,
Speaker 1: and it combined features of the inventions from Hargreaves and
Speaker 1: from Arkwright, which meant that you could create yarn that
Speaker 1: would be that would work for both the warp and
Speaker 1: the left using this one device. And by the name,
Speaker 1: the Crompton's Mule is actually a pun. So the spinning
Speaker 1: Jenny got its name from Hargreaves's daughter who knocked over
Speaker 1: the spinning wheel and get which gave him the idea.
Speaker 1: But a jenny is also the name for a female donkey,
Speaker 1: and if a donkey mates with a horse, the product
Speaker 1: is a mule. Thus Crumpton's mule is the descendant of
Speaker 1: the spinning jenny, which is cute, right, I mean, I
Speaker 1: appreciate it, but I like puns. At this point, spinners
Speaker 1: could finally outpace weavers, so the flying shuttle originally made
Speaker 1: It made a demand on yarn that spinners were having
Speaker 1: trouble meeting. But now with the with Crompton's mule and
Speaker 1: these other devices, there was a yarm production that was
Speaker 1: outpacing the weaving. But the balance was restored when another
Speaker 1: inventor came along named Edmund Cartwright, who created a water
Speaker 1: driven loom and that's sped up the weaving process even more.
Speaker 1: And Cartwright got the idea because he visited a water
Speaker 1: powered mill that Arkwright had des mind. So with this invention,
Speaker 1: there was now a new demand on cotton imports. So
Speaker 1: you see where the shifting demands have created the opportunity
Speaker 1: for people to invent machines to make things faster. First
Speaker 1: it was the need to speed up the weaving process.
Speaker 1: Then the need to speed up the yarn making process
Speaker 1: to meet the weaver's needs. Then weaving was falling behind.
Speaker 1: And now that they are both very fast compared to
Speaker 1: the way the process was just a few decades earlier.
Speaker 1: There was a greater need for raw material, raw cotton,
Speaker 1: and so the demand shifted from England to the places
Speaker 1: where they were importing cotton from, which was largely the
Speaker 1: American colonies. So I'm going to close out this particular
Speaker 1: episode with another famous invention that kept the industrial revolution
Speaker 1: rolling along strongly, and this one was an invention that
Speaker 1: happened here in America. So keep in mind that the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution and did affect the United States. The United
Speaker 1: States did have an industrial revolution, it just started later
Speaker 1: in the US than it did in England. In fact,
Speaker 1: England had instituted bands on the exportation of machinery and knowledge.
Speaker 1: England government did not want the industrial knowledge to get
Speaker 1: outside of the country because they wanted to have a
Speaker 1: competitive edge over other nations, particularly in Europe. But in America,
Speaker 1: there was a fellow named Eli Whitney who invented the
Speaker 1: cotton gin and I think pretty much everyone in elementary
Speaker 1: school at some point. Here's the story of Eli Whitney
Speaker 1: inventing the cotton gin. This was invented in the late
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds. Now what is the cotton gin. Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, cotton, when you pick cotton, you're actually picking
Speaker 1: a flower that looks like it's exploded everywhere. And cotton
Speaker 1: has a lot of seeds in it, and in order
Speaker 1: for you to turn cotton into yarn, you have to
Speaker 1: pick the seeds out, and that's very painstaking. It's a
Speaker 1: very slow process. Typically you would hand comb cotton with
Speaker 1: wire combs to get all the seeds out, and it
Speaker 1: takes time and a lot of effort. But the cotton
Speaker 1: gin made the process much easier and faster. So what
Speaker 1: Eli Whitney did was he created essentially a spinning drum
Speaker 1: that has a handle crank handle attached to it, so
Speaker 1: you turned the crank that makes the drums spin. On
Speaker 1: the drum, he had a set of wire teeth all
Speaker 1: along the drum side and that would just comb straight
Speaker 1: through the cotton bowls cotton balls being the name of
Speaker 1: the the raw cotton that you've picked off the plant,
Speaker 1: and that would pull out the seeds, so the seeds
Speaker 1: and and some strands of cotton would get dumped out
Speaker 1: the bottom of this device, and on the other side
Speaker 1: of it you would get cotton that had been cleaned,
Speaker 1: had been the seeds had been picked out of it,
Speaker 1: and all you had to do was turn the crank
Speaker 1: and it was much faster and took way less work
Speaker 1: than having to use combs to hand pick the seeds
Speaker 1: out of the cotton. So demand in England for cotton
Speaker 1: was really high, and this was just one of the
Speaker 1: ways the industrial Revolution was spreading beyond Britain itself, and
Speaker 1: of course, in the case of the United States, we
Speaker 1: have to mention this development is also connected to some
Speaker 1: truly awful moments in history, including the displacement of Native
Speaker 1: American tribes. Because you had Southern farmers who needed access
Speaker 1: to greater amounts of land, they wanted to grow more cotton.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of money in cotton. It was
Speaker 1: an incredibly valuable cash crop. Because the demand in England
Speaker 1: was so high for the cotton. Uh so the farmers
Speaker 1: wanted to have more land, and the easiest way they
Speaker 1: saw to get more land was to displace Native American
Speaker 1: tribes that had been living on that land for generations
Speaker 1: and making them move to other places and then they
Speaker 1: repurpose that land to grow cotton. That was one of
Speaker 1: the really ugly things that was a result of this
Speaker 1: particular explosion of industry. The other was the reliance upon slavery,
Speaker 1: a horrible institution that was very popular in the South
Speaker 1: at this time in American history. So obviously both of
Speaker 1: those things are terrible, but they also both made the
Speaker 1: early Industrial Revolution possible. The way it it unfolded so
Speaker 1: terrible thing, but we do have to acknowledge it. So
Speaker 1: we're just getting started with the Industrial Revolution. These are
Speaker 1: still the early years of the Industrial Revolution, but the
Speaker 1: textiles really led the way. They showed that something that
Speaker 1: originally took a very painstaking, slow handcrafted process could be
Speaker 1: made easier through technology. And as it was made easier,
Speaker 1: it could also be made more cheaply, which also that
Speaker 1: there could be you could sell it to more people,
Speaker 1: there could be a greater demand actually, and that that
Speaker 1: in turn created a demand for people to work in
Speaker 1: this industry. It gave created jobs in this new emerging
Speaker 1: middle class in England. Now, our next episode will look
Speaker 1: more at the iron industry and how that developed during
Speaker 1: the Revolution, including things like developing some pretty impressive architectural
Speaker 1: structures like bridges and canals, and will also talk about
Speaker 1: the development of the steam engine. And the third installment,
Speaker 1: I'm planning on talking more about how the Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: took place in other parts of the world, including America.
Speaker 1: Also that emergence of the working class and what conditions
Speaker 1: were like for the working class during the Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 1: How the technology of the time influenced the world we
Speaker 1: live in today, everything from just the way we think
Speaker 1: about work, the nature of work itself has been shaped
Speaker 1: by technology. Also the way that developing nations today are
Speaker 1: having their own industrial revolutions and the problems that that
Speaker 1: are that creates, as well as we try and factor
Speaker 1: in things like how how can we encourage developing nations
Speaker 1: to be environmentally conscious when in our own past, both
Speaker 1: in in Europe and in the United States, we have
Speaker 1: gone through this same process, you know, a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty to two hundred years earlier, but we didn't worry
Speaker 1: about environmental concerns while we went through that process. That
Speaker 1: didn't that was not something that we thought about while
Speaker 1: that was going on, And yet we're placing those sort
Speaker 1: of demands on other people today. I hope you enjoyed
Speaker 1: that classic episode the first part of a three part series.
Speaker 1: Next week we will continue with part two. If you
Speaker 1: have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes
Speaker 1: of tech Stuff, please reach out and let me know
Speaker 1: the best way to do that. Well, there's two ways.
Speaker 1: One is to download the i Heart Radio app, which
Speaker 1: is free to download and use. You can navigate over
Speaker 1: to tech Stuff on the search bar and you can
Speaker 1: use a little microphone icon there to leave a voice
Speaker 1: message up to thirty seconds in length letting me know
Speaker 1: what you would like in future episodes. Or you can
Speaker 1: reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the
Speaker 1: show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon Y. Text Stuff is an
Speaker 1: I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.