Edmund Cartwright

British clergyman

• Born: April 24, 1743
• Birthplace: Marnham, Nottingham, England
• Died: October 30, 1823
• Place of death: Hastings, Sussex, England

Cartwright’s creation of the power loom was one in a series of significant eighteenth century inventions that revolutionized textile manufacturing, especially cotton textiles, in England and is considered part of the Industrial Revolution, which transformed England’s socioeconomic structure.

Primary fields: Business management; manufacturing

Primary invention: Power loom

Early Life

Edmund Cartwright’s (KAHRT-rit) early life is not that well documented. His father, William, was a landowner in Nottinghamshire, England. William and his wife, Alice, had thirteen children, and Edmund was the fourth son. Edmund attended Wakefield Grammar School, graduated from University College, Oxford University, and was elected to a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford University, in 1764. He published a long poem, “Armine and Elvira,” in 1770 and “Prince of Peace” in 1779. He pursued a career in the Church of England and became rector at Goadby, Marwood, Leicestershire, in 1779 and prebend of Lincoln Cathedral. Edmund’s brother, Major John Cartwright (1740-1824), was a supporter of political reform during the reign of George III (r. 1760-1820). However, Edmund’s fame was not to come from preaching, poetry, or politics; it came from inventing—an unexpected development considering his background and training. Edmund was married twice, first to Alice and then to Susannah after Alice’s death.

Life’s Work

Textile production in England had long been a significant sector of the economy. Because of the large number of sheep in England, the production of woolen cloth provided work for many villages through a process variably called the domestic or putting-out system or the cottage industry, whereby a cloth merchant would drop off raw wool to villagers who owned spinning wheels and handlooms. Inhabitants turned the raw wool into thread and bolts of cloth and then received payment from the merchants. The people worked at their own pace, with their families and at home. Working with family and friends to supplement their agricultural income became a social as well as an economic activity. All this would begin to change in the eighteenth century as the factory system developed, causing people to commute to work instead of working at home and to become subject to “industrial discipline” by being at work at an appointed time, only having an allotted time for meals, and receiving corporal punishment. There was also extensive reliance on child and woman labor.

The series of inventions started with John Kay’s flying shuttle (1733), which allowed weavers to weave more quickly. Cotton began to become the preferred material to work with because of England’s connections to the colonies of the American South, Egypt, and India. Because of the flying shuttle, weavers outpaced the spinners, and it was not until 1764 that James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny allowed spinners to produce more thread and catch up to the weavers. In 1769, Richard Arkwright invented the spinning frame, also known as the water frame, which spun multiple threads into yarn; the large machine was powered by water and had to be housed in a building by a stream—in effect, a factory. Samuel Crompton in 1779 combined the spinning jenny and the water frame to create what is basically the modern spinning device—the spinning mule, or water mule.

In 1784, while Cartwright was on vacation at Matlock, Derbyshire, he met with a group of businessmen from Manchester, and they discussed the textile industry and the problem that resulted from Arkwright’s water frame: Though the machine spun a great quantity of thread, it was difficult to weave the thread quickly into cloth. This meeting led to Cartwright’s visit to Arkwright’s textile mill in Derbyshire to view textile manufacturing firsthand. Cartwright was inspired to invent a weaving machine to complement the water frame. The first version that was produced with the help of a carpenter and blacksmith was modified, and Cartwright was awarded a patent for the device in 1785. The power loom was a very large, complex steam-powered machine that took two people to operate. The basic design was modified by Cartwright and other inventors to allow the machine to stop when the thread broke and to remove the finished cloth by rolling it off when the process was complete.

The relatively open social structure in England enabled a clergyman to become a textile entrepreneur by attempting to profit from his own invention. Although Cartwright built his own textile factories with steam-powered looms at Doncaster in 1787, he was not a successful businessman, declaring bankruptcy and shutting down in 1793—an apparent failure at age fifty. This also caused hardship for his brothers and sisters who had invested in his textile ventures. He did sell four hundred of his power looms to another manufacturing company, but that factory burned down. Local authorities and subsequent historians have suspected that arson on the part of disgruntled weavers may have been the cause of his factory’s destruction. Before the mechanization of textile production, weavers were highly skilled artisans; now they had been reduced to fixing broken threads on machines or removing bolts of finished cloth from the power looms. This loss of prestige and even loss of employment caused many textile workers to petition authorities for redress, while others resorted to violence—smashing textile machinery, burning factories, and engaging in riots.

Cartwright continued tinkering and was awarded several additional patents. In 1790, he patented a wool-combing machine, and in 1792 he invented a machine for making rope. Finally, in 1797, he received a patent for an alcohol engine, similar to a steam engine in concept but using alcohol rather than water. One can understand the lack of success for this last device, as alcohol is more expensive and harder to obtain than water. In 1801, Parliament extended his patent for the power loom for an additional fourteen years, but in the following year, a textile manufacturer, William Horrocks, received a patent for an improved version of Cartwright’s power loom that increased productivity. In 1807, Cartwright petitioned Parliament for recognition of the importance of his invention and for some monetary compensation. Robert Peel, a prominent member of the House of Commons and a wealthy textile manufacturer, supported this petition, and in 1809 Parliament voted a sum ofœ10,000 in recognition of the benefits that the power loom had bestowed upon England. This substantial payment helped Cartwright satisfy serious personal debt, as recent projects of his such as interlocking bricks and incombustible floorboards failed to come to fruition.

Cartwright had earned a doctor of divinity degree from Oxford University in 1806, and with his grant of money from Parliament he purchased a farm in Sevenoaks, Kent, where he lived a quiet, unassuming life. He died at Hastings, Sussex, and was buried at Battle, Sussex.

Impact

The power loom, along with the other textile inventions, produced major structural changes for all levels of British society. For the individual, factory work replaced working at home; families—husband, wife, and children—often ended up working in the factory, until the Factory Acts of the nineteenth century regulated working hours and conditions and banned work by children under certain ages. Many skilled artisans were reduced to textile workers who performed monotonous and even dangerous tasks in noisy factories that were hot in summer and cold in winter. There was no accident insurance or workers’ compensation, so workers who were injured often lost their jobs. However, manufactured clothing became cheaper because cotton was easier to work with, and it was easier to care for and could be dyed various colors. Slowly, real wages rose, allowing workers to purchase manufactured products. Middle-class factory owners gained wealth, and during the nineteenth century they began to push for political power commensurate with their newly acquired wealth.

Localities changed because of the development of textile mills. It is estimated that there were more than two thousand power looms in England in 1810. As people left the countryside because of agricultural unemployment caused by the enclosure movement that forced farmers of smaller parcels off their land, they moved to work in textile mills, causing those industrial areas to explode into massive cities of several hundreds of thousands of inhabitants within a few decades. Such rapid urbanization brought significant problems: overcrowded slums of substandard housing, pollution, crime, prostitution, and disease. For example, Manchester grew in population from about 25,000 in 1772 to almost 370,000 by 1850.

England became known as “the workshop of the world” and increased its economic power many times over, especially through exports of textiles and other items produced by factory labor. Until the late nineteenth century, England’s exports were larger than the combined exports of a number of European countries. England’s influence in India through the East India Company expanded because of the export of manufactured cotton textiles to India that nearly ruined India’s own hand-produced textile industry. In the twentieth century, Mohandas Gandhi’s protest movement against British domination of India included ritual spinning of cotton thread to promote economic self-reliance and political independence.

Bibliography

Stearns, Peter N. The Industrial Revolution in World History. 3d ed. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2007. A broadly focused survey that provides the context for Cartwright’s invention and is strong on the effects of mechanization in the textile industry.

Strickland, Mary, and Jane Margaret Strickland. A Memoir of Edmund Cartwright: A Memoir of the Life, Writings, and Mechanical Inventions of Edmund Cartwright. 1843. Reprint. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1971. Although an older work, this book contains the most complete biographical information about Cartwright and captures the immediacy of his achievement, as it was published shortly after his death.

Weightman, Gavin. Industrial Revolutionaries: The Creation of the Modern World, 1776-1914. London: Atlantic Books, 2007. This work is strong on the importance of the individual inventors and entrepreneurs and the social and economic impacts of industrialization.