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Made in Manchester:  From cotton to textiles

Made in Manchester: From cotton to textiles

June 2019 · 4 min read

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The history of cotton manufacturing is intertwined with the history of Manchester, and there is no better place to learn about this than its Science & Industry Museum. They have an amazing exhibit; daily demonstrations of cotton processing on old functioning textile machines. I'm not sure what was more interesting, the sight and racket of the working machines or the stories of the workers' lives.

Manchester: Made of Cotton

Cotton transformed Manchester into a city like nothing the world had ever seen. From its towering mills, bustling warehouses and crowded streets came new ways to live and work.

... From a sign at the museum

By the end of the 17th century, Manchester was already famous for processing wool, cotton and silk. In the late 18th century, with the coming of the industrial revolution, the textile industry boomed and Manchester's population grew from about 10,000 to 70,000.

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It was a time of innovation, above, a cotton gin. In the US, Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin in 1794, speeding up the removal of seeds and husks from cotton fiber.

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There are many steps required to turn raw cotton into textiles. After the cotton gin, the cotton moves to the blow room where it is opened, cleaned, mixed and pressed into uniform fiber sheets.

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In the next step, the fiber sheet or lap is fed into the carding machine where it is combed into parallel threads. The output of this process is carded slivers.

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The next step is the Draw Frame where the slivers are combined and elongated, then the Comber produces smoother, finer, stronger and more uniform threads. Next, the Speed frame twists the threads to make the yarn stronger. This continues on the Ring Frame. Twisted threads are much stronger than untwisted ones.

We have gradually worked our way from little round balls of cotton to the yarn, below.

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You can certainly imagine the air filled with cotton fibers. Workers, choking and breathing it all in, suffered from lung ailments and often lived in slum-like conditions where diseases easily spread.

It wasn't until 1845 that the Manchester city council took responsibility for removing garbage and sewage. There was no indoor plumbing at the time. People used cesspits or a bucket with a grid on top to catch their excrement. At night a horse and cart came around to collect it and this "night soil" was sent by train to the farms in the countryside.

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There were frames of different styles and ages. On a large Ring Frame, we were shown where children crawled under it to repair broken threads, the machines never stopping. It's pictured on the left, above.

Spinning Room

Hot, humid and deafeningly noisy, in the spinning room, machines twisted the cotton to make yarn. Dodging fast moving machines, children were forced to risk their safety to fix broken threads and sweep up. Laws passed in the 19th century banned very young children from working. In 1918, it become illegal for anyone under 14 to be employed.

... From a sign at the museum

My grandpa once told me he had worked from age 6. He turned 15 in 1918. I never asked where he had worked back then but his father and uncle were both employed in the mills.

Now we move to weaving with different types of looms.

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A small exhibit featured yarn dyeing. I paid attention because only weeks earlier I had learned from a census that my great-grandfather was a velvet dyer!

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Here, a jacquard pattern is encoded in the cards, above, for the Jacquard Hand Loom and produced the fabric, seen below.

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Lives Transformed

For the thousands of people working in Manchester's mills, life was transformed. Families competed for every patch of living space. They crammed into small, badly built houses on crowded streets near the cotton mills.

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By the 1840s, people had begun to realize the impact Manchester's transformation was having on its workers. However, it took a long time for living conditions to get better.

... From a sign at the museum

References

Science&Industry Textiles Gallery
A Brief History of Manchester, England
Yarn Manufacturing Process

Images

Taken by me with my Canon SX620 HS at the Science & Industry Museum in Manchester, UK.

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I hope you enjoyed the exhibit!
@kansuze

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