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Edmund Cartwright was born in Nottinghamshire, England, on April 24, 1743, and died in Sussex, also in England, on October 20, 1823. He was a clergyman and an inventor; he patented the first power loom and an improved version of the handloom, and designed a wool-combing machine and a rope-making instrument.
Edmund Cartwright graduated from Oxford University and married Elizabeth McMac when he was 19 years old. Edmund Cartwright’s father was religious, so he took up the same vocation by becoming a clergyman, initially at Goadby Marwood in Leicestershire. In 1786 he became dignitary of Lincoln Cathedral, a position he held until his death. Edmund Cartwright had four brothers who also had prominent activities. John Cartwright was a naval officer who fought for political reform in the British Parliament, while George Cartwright was a merchant who explored Newfoundland and the Labrador peninsula.
The inventor
Edmund Cartwright was an inventor who began to develop this vocation at the age of 40. After visiting Richard Arkwright’s cotton spinning mills in Derbyshire, he had the idea of creating a weaving machine. Although he had no experience and many people thought his ideas were nonsense, Edmund Cartwright, with the help of a carpenter, was able to bring his idea to fruition. He completed the design of his first power loom in 1784 and obtained a patent for his invention in 1785.
Edmund Cartwright’s first design was unsuccessful, but he continued to improve it until he developed a machine that produced cloth. He built a facility in Doncaster to manufacture the power looms he had designed, but as he had no experience or knowledge as an industrialist, he failed to market his power looms and used the factory to develop new inventions. In 1789 he invented a machine for combing wool, while continuing to improve his power loom design, and in 1792 he patented another of his inventions.
Due to his inexperience in the commercial management of his mechanical loom factory, the business failed in 1893 and Edmund Cartwright had to close the factory. He sold 400 looms to a Manchester company but lost the rest when his factory burned down. Bankrupt and without means, Edmund Cartwright moved to London in 1796, where he worked on other ideas. He invented a steam engine that used alcohol, and a rope-making machine. He also helped Robert Fulton with his steamboats, and worked on ideas for interlocking bricks and building fire-retardant floorboards.
Although many of Edmund Cartwright’s inventions were unsuccessful, his work was recognized by the House of Commons for the benefits his power loom produced. Lawmakers awarded the inventor a £10,000 prize for his contributions.
The improvements of the mechanical loom and its importance
The power loom designed by Edmund Cartwright needed to be improved, and several inventors rose to the challenge; it was the Scottish inventor William Horrocks and the American Francis Cabot Lowell who introduced significant improvements. The use of the mechanical loom expanded from 1820, being operated mainly by women in the textile factories.
Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant, realized that in order for the United States to keep up with textile production in England, where power looms had been used since the early 19th century, they needed to incorporate British technology. While visiting English textile mills, Francis Lowell memorized the operation of his power looms, which were based on Edmund Cartwright’s design. And when he returned to the United States he hired a mechanical designer named Paul Moody to help him recreate and develop what he had seen.
Francis Lowell and Paul Moody thus succeeded in adapting the British design, and in the factory they established in Waltham they continued to improve the design of the power loom. The first American power loom was built in Massachusetts in 1813. And with the introduction of a reliable power loom to the textile industry in the United States, weaving caught up with spinning production. The power loom allowed for the mass manufacture of cloth from ginned cotton, an innovation by Eli Whitney.
Edmund Cartwright’s invention was fundamental in the evolution of textile production. Weaving was the last step in the textile production process to be mechanized due to the difficulty of designing mechanisms with levers, cams, gears, and springs precise enough to reproduce the coordination of the human hand and eye. Edmund Cartwright’s power loom, though flawed, was the first such device to achieve that goal, speeding up the manufacturing process for all kinds of cloth.
Sources
Berend, Ivan. An Economic History of Nineteenth-Century Europe: Diversity and Industrialization . Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Cannon, John, Crowcroft, Robert. The Oxford Companion to British History . Oxford University Press, 2015.
Hendrickson, Kenneth E. The Encyclopedia of the Industrial Revolution in World History . Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
