The Textile Industry: An Account of the Early Inventions of Spinning, Weaving, and Knitting Machines by Walter English (review)
1970; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tech.1970.a894060
ISSN1097-3729
Autores Tópico(s)Fashion and Cultural Textiles
Resumo636 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The Textile Industry: An Account of the Early Inventions of Spinning, Weaving, and Knitting Machines. By Walter English. Longmans In dustrial Archaeology Series, edited by L. T. C. Rolt. New York: Humanities Press, 1969. Pp. 242. $8.25. This book meets the need for a one-volume introduction to the ma chinery which, during the 18th and early 19th centuries, laid the foun dations of the modern textile industry. Generally, the author’s technique is to devote a chapter to each important machine (stocking frame, jenny, water frame, mule, power loom, etc.), briefly indicating its ori gins, advantages, and impact, lucidly explaining its principles of opera tion, and quickly summarizing the salient points of its inventor’s biog raphy. Supporting chapters deal with groups of subsidiary inventions, the factory system, two English pioneers of the 19th century (Titus Salt and Samuel C. Lister), and trends in current textile technology. British developments gain most attention, but American and European improvements are not neglected. Although in a series on industrial archaeology, the book contains only one small section directly related to this subject: a helpful appended list of British museums retaining textile exhibits. The editor of the series has apparently not taken the opportunity to write a general introduc tion presenting the rationale behind this and the other projected volumes. Mr. English aims at what he calls the “historical-technical approach” (p. xiii) to industrial history—a mean between the modern social and economic treatments on one hand and the rather technical 19th-century studies on the other. Within each chapter he succeeds in relating ma chines to men but, owing to the organization of his book, finds difficulty in attaining continuity between chapters. This disjointedness might have diminished with a more analytical and less strictly chronological meth od. Also, with economies in style, the author might well have extended his terms of reference to include finishing devices. Almost entirely based on printed sources, this account commendably draws on the patents of invention in their printed form. The bibliogra phy would be improved by the inclusion of Rees’s Cyclopaedia (cited in the footnotes), Ure’s Cotton Manufacture, and the recent work of Julia de L. Mann, Kenneth Ponting, and Jennifer Tann on the West of England woolen industry. Unfortunately, the mechanical apparatus of the book leaves much to be desired: footnotes, rather sparse anyway, are placed at the end of the volume rather than at the bottom of each page; full bibliographic details are unnecessarily given in each footnote; page numbers are inexplicably omitted from the notes; and citation of article literature is inconsistent. Hopefully, the glaring proofreading errors will be corrected when the next edition or another impression appears. A number of specific and substantive points occurred to me in read ing the study: despite the comment on page 31, the flying shuttle is depicted on wheels, almost a century after its invention, in Rees (1815) TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 637 and Guest (1823); figure 21 from Guest derives from the earlier plate in Rees; Arkwright need not have used a mechanical device to open his cotton (p. 62) since the manual beating frame was more effective, espe cially with finer and longer staples, until the late 19th century; in the diagram on page 72, the mule-carriage spindles should be inclined from the vertical for the twist to be inserted; and, contrary to page 116, Robert Owen claimed to have spun 300s counts with a mule as early as 1792. Written in nontechnical language by a practicing textile engineer who has illustrated his admirable machine descriptions with extremely helpful diagrams and plates, this book should serve readers who wish to understand and appreciate the technological achievements in one sector of the Industrial Revolution but want fuller and simpler explanations than those found in Singer’s History of Technology. For historians of technology and industrial archaeologists, it paves the way for mono graphs on early surviving machines, for surveys of the development of types of textile machines, and for investigations of various ancillary aspects (like machine building) of the textile industry. David J. Jf.remy* The Hollingworth Letters: Technical Change in the Textile...
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