Employment and location

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The early expansion of the textile industries occurred in the countryside. Factories needed a large source of power, and they used traditional technology to acquire it. Water power had for long provided a cheap means of providing circular motion that would drive machinery, as seen in the water mills for grinding corn or fulling cloth.

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Water power and fast flowing streams conditioned the location of industry. If a more powerful source of power was needed, this would be obtained by building a larger dam, or tapping water from higher up the stream and taking it in a much more level canal to maximise the potential power.

Examine how the water mill at Belper worked in the scene that follows:

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By contrast the early steam engines needed coal that was difficult to obtain in most areas and they were unable to provide the circular power without which the mills could not operate. They were effective in providing an up-and-down action suitable for pumping water but this was all.

Some examples of early power sources are explored in this scene:

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Later in the 1780s, James Watt and others found a means of converting this up-and-down action into a circular action that could be used to power machines. Factories were increasingly powered by steam. Approximately 80 percent of cotton mills were steam powered in 1838, 90 percent by 1850.

The Watt engine is demonstrated in this scene:

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The development of machines that could provide such circular motion helped transform the location of the industry. No longer did factories have to be strung along streams but they could now be concentrated together with many other mills.

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New and much larger towns could grow that were dominated by the textile mills powered by coal. Now industry would depend for expansion on easy access to coal whether a mill was on the coalfield itself or had good links to the coalfield by canal. This changing location of industry is seen in the case studies in the following sections of this module: the West Riding of Yorkshire woollen industry, Huddersfield in particular, and the cotton town of Burnley in Lancashire.