First Woolen Factory.— Slater brought here his spinning machinery ideas; in the same way Arthur Scholfield, three years later, invented the first wool-carding machine, which he built and put into operation at Byfield, Mass., in 1794, thus fixing the date of the beginning of the fac tory manufacture of wool by machinery oper ated by power in the United States. American machinists and inventors did the rest. It is not to be denied, however, that the English statute did retard, embarrass and make trebly difficult the early development of our textile factories. A century ago the American textile industries were easily 100 years behind those of Great Britain. • Steps of Evolution.—It would be interesting to follow the evolution of the household indus try, by slow and gradual steps, into the highly organized factory- system of America to-day. First came the neighborhood fulling-mill utiliz ing the friendly services of the adjacent stream, and relieving the housewife of the labor of full ing and finishing thc cloths and blankets accu mulated by the busy shuttle during the long winter evenings. Then the carding-machine was added to the fulling-mill; the farmeis for miles about brought their wool to be converted into rolls ready for the spinning-wheel. After Slater had successfully applied the Arkwright invention to t,he spinning of cotton at Pawtucicet, here and there throughout New England little mills gradually appeared which spun both cot ton and woolen yarns by water power. Hand looms were still used in all these mills until 1813, when the invention of a power-loom by Francis C. Lowell led to the building of the Waltham cotton factory by the Boston Manu facturing Company, and the American textile mill first took on the characteristics which have since increasingly distinguished it. Power spin ning and weaving machines were rapidly ap plied to the manufacture of woolens, and it be gan to be seen that the household manufacture of textiles was disappearing before the greater economy and efficiency of the factory system. The transition was not rapid, and the ups and downs of our first textile mills were numerous and discouraging.
War of 1812.— The outbreak of the War of 1812, and the non-intercourse acts and embargo which preceded it, were the most potent factors in completing the transition. The total suspen sion of importations threw our people suddenly upon their own resources for their entire supply of clothing. Cotton and woolen mills were quickly built. High prices and the promise of quick fortunes drew many men with little or no knowledge of manufacturing into the business. All went well enough until the war ended; then followed collapse and ruin. The work of laying the solid foundations of textile manufacturing had all to he done over again. Imported cot tons and woolens again invaded the market with a rush, and the domestic manufacturers found it impossible to compete with them either in quality or in price. Labor was unskilled and hard to get ; knowledge and experience were sadly wanting; machinery was clumsy and de fective; the country was poverty-stricken, and trade and the national finances thoroughly demoralized.
First Protective Tariff.— Then first began the great battle in Congress, which was waged more or less intermittently ever since, for the protection of the domestic manufactures by means of tariff laws. The Tariff Act of 1816 — the first of the series in which the principle of protection was recognized in the rates fixed as a distinct purpose of the law, conjointly with the raising of revenue— was much more favor able to the cotton than to the wool manufac ture, because it applied the minimum principle to cotton cloths, which was in effect a specific duty of WA cents a yard, while the simple ad valorem rate of 25 per cent was applied gen erally to woolen goods. From the date of that law the cotton manufacture began a healthy de velopment, and it naturally grew much faster than the wool manufacture. The later tariffs were in like degree, as a rule, more. favorable to cotton than to woolens; partly owing to tins fact and partly to other .causes, such as the much more delicate, complicated and expensive operations incident to the latter, the . cotton manufacture has at all times except during the Civil War shown a greater prosperity and on the whole a more rapid development than its sister industry. But in both industsies .for
many years it was an up-hili struggle against great odds. Few fortunes were made; many were lost, and the courage and tenacity of those early textile manufacturers deserve to be remembered.
From 1850.— In the last half of the 19th century there was an increase in the value of products of about six times, and not less than 10 times if it were possible to measure this product by quantity instead of by value., Even the largest figures convey an inadequate idea of the relative importance of our textile mills in the industrial economy of the nation, for these mills supply the materials for a great group of subsidiary factory industries, such as the wholesale clothing manufacture, the shirt manufacture, etc. When we aggregate these, and add to them the value of the products of the linen, jute, hemp and bagging mills of the country, we find that the product of our textile mills is larger in value than that of any single line of related industries, iron and steel ex cepted. The products of the textile mills and the factory products growing out of them are equal in value to more than one-ninth of all our manufactures.
Machinery and Diminished The de crease in the cost of goods during the last half century has been one of the most striking phases of the development. This decrease is due in some measure, of course, to the de creased price of the raw materials from which they are made; but in even larger measure is it due to the remarkable advance in the methods of manufacture— to the new and more perfect machinery employed, in the invention of which American mechanical genius has contributed certainly as much as that of any other people, and perhaps more. All the fundamental 'in ventions in spinning machinery were of Eng lish origin; so was the combing machine and the power loom. The English have a remark able record in this respect, and the French and the Germans have also done •much in the in vention of labor-saving textile machinery. But the American record may be shown to surpass them all. The wool-carding machinery of all countries owes its chief improvements over the machines of a century ago to the invention of John Goulding of Worcester, Mass., whose patent, dated 1826, dispensed with the splicing billy and produced the endless roll or sliver. Michel Alcan, the distinguished French writer, describes it as "the most important advance in the wool manufacture of the 19th century.° It was not a step,' he says, "but a flight.° The modern cotton spindle, making 10,000 revolu tions a minute, is an evolution of our own mechanics. It has been shown that the saving effected by the new forms of spindle invented and adopted in the United States since 1870, when 5,000 revolutions a minute was the average speed, has been more than equal to the capacity of all the warp-spinning machinery in use in this country in that year, and to-day more than three times as much warp-yarn is spun in the United•States as in 1870, a rate of increase without parallel since the earliest introduction of the cotton manufacture. The Lowell loom was the first successful application of power to the weaving of cotton, the Crompton loom to the weaving of fancy woolens and the Bigelow loom to the weaving of carpets. "Not a yard of fancy woolens,' wrote Samuel Lawrence, "had ever been woven by power looms in any country until it was done by George Crompton at the Middlesex Mills in Every carpet ever woven was woven by hand until the power loom of Erastus Brigham Bigelow revolution ized the industry. Beyond these fundamental machines the American mechanisms for ex pediting processes, for automatic devices, for dispensing with intermediate help, have been so numerous that they have completely trans formed the modes operandi of textile mills throughout the world. These mechanisms are more generally in use to-day in the best American textile mills than in those of any other country. So far as mechanical equip ment is concerned, our best mills, whether cot ton or woolen, are fairly equal to the best in any foreign country. It does not follow that textile manufacturing is done here, as a rule, with equal economy in cost.