The Age of Machinery: Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770–1850 by Gillian Cookson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Age of Machinery: Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770–1850 by Gillian Cookson Barbara Hahn (bio) The Age of Machinery: Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770–1850. By Gillian Cookson. Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2018. Pp. 324. Paperback $25.95. This engaging, erudite study investigates the firms and people who made the machines of the Industrial Revolution, which Cookson defines classically, as the mechanization of British textiles 1770-1850. Trained in economic history, Dr. Cookson (who once collaborated with this reviewer) changes a conversation that focused on wages and coal prices, or on Enlightenment ideas, toward the motivations, education, and experiences of the early textile engineers. Along the way she dispenses with myths, including the anachronistic idea of "individualistic entrepreneurs," and any contribution of clockworks to textile machinery after 1800. Her machine-makers, "acting as any artisan would when faced with a changing world," nonetheless created a "new culture, beyond artisanship" in their works (pp. 125–26). How, she begins, "had it been possible to build a new high-tech industry practically from scratch?" (p. 2) The answer, of course, is that people made it from what already existed. Cookson acknowledges that the textile engineering sector was powerfully transformative but shows how slowly it consolidated out of older artisanal trades. By 1790, specialists in making textile machinery had entered the historical record (first by testifying against the originality of Richard Arkwright's patents), but the trade became recognizable only after 1800. Before then, woodworking was a crucial component of textile engineering. About 1805, casting iron frames and working iron sheet metal became central to making new devices, but these were still manual skills. In the early 1820s, "a climactic wave of innovation in textiles" began "fully exploiting steam-powered machine tools and interchangeable production" of the machines intended for use in textile factories (pp. 104–5). Nonetheless, the sector remained transitional until the 1840s, with some firms still filing parts to fit together, using calipers with tolerances no finer than 1/32 of an inch. After that point, however, "machines made machines" and more firms had begun factory production of textile machinery (p. 232). This periodization identifies technological closure [End Page 630] among customers too, whose development of standardized cloth-making processes accompanied the history of building the machinery they used. The language of the industry reflected its origins, as textile engineers "habitually labelled themselves, in . . . official documents, by their earliest trade" (p. 77). Apprenticeship also flourished in textile engineering into the nineteenth century, even as it faded in more traditional trades and in the textile mills themselves (where pauper children had regularly been apprenticed into the first mills, in compliance with Elizabethan Poor Laws). Tinsmithing and ironworking skills also had a long history in the forges and furnaces of the region, combined under the control of a few families in the eighteenth century. The new engineering flourished in communities bound by kinship and religion, and created a sector in which journeymen could tramp in time-honored fashion among firms to learn and spread new skills. As the new engineering solidified, the best firms replicated the community structures in which they had developed. What of innovation? Cookson's comprehensive, invaluable appendices provide family trees of engineers, their training stints and firms. These networks undermine invention myths that know only the patented devices of James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton, and Edmund Cartwright. Her men did less inventing than "making things work," which often involved getting fibers prepared in more regular ways to enter the more celebrated, if regularly modified, machinery. Within firms, "The knack was to manage the imperfect while chasing perfection" (pp. 229, 231). Her exploration of subcontracting is an important aid to understanding what happened during industrialization, and it helps account for the importance of family and community in shaping the sector. Maintenance also receives its due, as Cookson remarks how many mechanics worked in textile factories rather than foundries. So does the throstle, a spinning device named for singing like a bird, too often neglected in progress-oriented accounts. Cookson's intimate familiarity with places like Keighley and Chowbent and men like Benjamin Gott and Matthew Murray may disorient some readers less familiar with the region, the...