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87
manufacture, or 'factory'. These 'capitalists' employed the workers for wages. They
appeared first in those trades where heavy machinery and capital was most necessary:
mainly in coal-mining, where the early steam pumps saved many pits from ruin
through flooding, and in textile production, where a number of inventions were
revolutionizing spinning and weaving.
It was through the impact of these new machines that Britain hitherto a nation
of farmers, turned into an industrial state – and that Englishmen left the countryside
by their many, thousands to crowd into the towns
1
and seek employment in the
factories which seemed to promise work and livelihood for all. Spinning and
weaving, a most important industry in a cold, northern climate had been carried out in
the villages with spinning-wheels and hand looms; but although the cloth produced in
this way was expensive, the men and women who made it lived in poverty from the
cradle to the grave. Only a substantial rise in the level of production could have
increased the country's standard of living. Taxes took away much of the people's
earnings, and feudal restrictions prevented a free exchange of goods and services.
The new machines broke through this barrier, changing an old-fashioned
handicraft to modern mass production. John Kay, a poor clockmaker from
Lancashire, made the beginning with his 'fly shuttle', a little box on either side of the
loom, where the shuttle remained between its journeys across the warp threads. Each
box had a little rod, one end of which was fastened to a cord, and when the cord was
pulled the rod hit the shuttle and shot it across the loom into the little box on the other
side. Then the cord on the other side was pulled, and the shuttle flew back again.
Thus the weaver– instead of throwing the shuttle across and back again by hand –
could work much faster, and the width of the cloth could be doubled.
John Kay made his invention in 1733. Thirty-five years later, a weaver, James
Hargreaves invented a spinning machine – which he called 'Spinning Jenny' after his
wife –with eight spindles operated by a single wheel. Later he built a machine with
thirty spindles. Richard Arkwright, a barber by profession, heard the weavers in his
home town complain that the yarn produced by the new spinning-jenny was not as
fine and smooth as that spun by the old method. With the help of a watch-maker he
built a new machine which squeezed the wool or cotton into long, flat strands and
then twisted them into smooth threads. The machine was good but heavy and could
be worked only by power; as it was first worked by water power it became known as
the 'water-frame'.
At the turn of the century a young university graduate from Massachusetts, Eli
Whitney revolutionized cotton harvesting by his invention of the 'cotton gin'. Negro
slaves had been used in the southern states of the USA to separate the fibre from the
seeds by hand; the gin did it mechanically. It was this machine which influenced the
development of the whole of the United States more than any other; cotton became
the country's great source of wealth. When Whitney first introduced his machine, the
USA produced no more than 140,000 lb. of cotton per year: in 1800, only a few years
later, the figure was 35 million pounds.
All these inventors had to struggle hard against prejudice and fear, most of all
among the workers, who were worried about losing their jobs when those new
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