Creamware: a very pleasant tea-drinking vessel. The man who first made this genteel crockery was a hero of the industrial revolution: engineer, scientist, marketing genius – Josiah Wedgwood turned cups and saucers into an international business empire. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e3: Clocking On
The Wedgwood factory near Stoke ... A production line: consistent quality on a massive scale. ibid.
This new product used powdered flint for colour and texture. And was made of white clay and stone from Cornwall and bore clay from Devon and Dorset. And Cream-ware was the speciality of Josiah Wedgwood. Master potter, inventor, and one of the great entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution. ibid.
You can’t put this lot straight into a kiln; you have to make a protective container known as a sagger. And this job is known as sagger-maker’s-bottom-knocking ... Leading to this – the Bottle Kiln. ibid.
In fifty years revolutionaries like Wedgwood transformed the trade of potter into an industry. Wedgwood’s manufactory innovations were so well executed and so durable that Cream, or rather Queen’s-ware, is still made today. ibid.
Steam-power had finally arrived in the textile industry. And this is what the boilers are generating steam for: it’s a tandem – because there are two cylinders one in front of the other like a bike – compound – because the steam is used more than once – condensing – because downstairs is James Watt's separate condenser – creating a partial vacuum in this the big cylinder – steam engine! It develops five hundred horsepower. Mark Williams: Industrial Revelations s1e4: Pennine Passage
Because this is what it’s driving – three hundred power looms. You can get an idea of how loud it is, but you can’t feel the concrete floor vibrating ... Now everything is powered by steam. ibid.
Soon entrepreneurs started building factories to house the stocking frames ... These frame-knitter workshops with their high long windows to let in light were all built together around 1820. Mark Williams: Industrial Revelations s2e2: What to Wear? Discovery 2005
The knitters took their employers to court with little effect. So, under the mythical leadership of one General Lud well-organised gangs of knitters smashed the frames of any employers who broke the law. ibid.
A sewing machine did away with ten tailors. ibid.
By the 1760s they could use a Spinning Jenny: a glorified spinning wheel with several spindles: but even it couldn’t keep up with demand. Ronald Top, Industrial Revelations: Europe s4e4: Cotton, Linen and Rope, Discovery 2006
Arkwright built a series of mills across the north of England. This is Cromford: the first. His appetite for cotton was insatiable. ibid.
In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people – the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same. A N Wilson
The Enlightenment ... All of those things in a single individual ... Wedgwood was a founding father of the industrial revolution with a relentless urge to change. A N Wilson, The Genius of Josiah Wedgwood, BBC 2013
The company went through a post-war renaissance. ibid.
America would become Wedgwood’s most important overseas market. ibid.
Josiah asked for permission to call his Creamware – Queensware. ibid.
Josiah’s science was self-taught. ibid.
We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end. Lewis Mumford
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell. W H Auden
You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads that the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. Elizabeth Warren
The boom is powered on a new machine: the power loom. Raw cotton comes in; finished cloth goes out. All under one roof. The modern factory is born ... 85% are single women between fifteen and twenty-five. Harriett Robinson is ten. America: The Story of the US: Division, History 2010
The mills also revolutionised how Americans dressed. ibid.
And together they begin to make their voices heard. In October 1836 women from the Lowell Mills gather after work and organise. Their protest against wage cuts is one of the first strikes in US history. And they will win. The mill bosses backed down. A generation of young women go on to become teachers, writers and college graduates. Harriet Robinson would become a leading suffragette. ibid.
Henry Ford had created a new kind of car ... The assembly line completely changed manufacturing for ever. The Men Who Built America VIII: The New Machine, History 2012
– An inventive Age
Has wrought, if not with speed of magic, yet
To most strange issues. I have lived to mark
A new and unforeseen creation rise
From out the labours of a peaceful Land
Wielding her potent enginery to frame
And to produce, with rests not night or day,
Industrious to destroy! William Wordsworth, The Manufacturing Spirit
I turn my eyes to the Schools and Universities of Europe,
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,
Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth
In heavy wreaths folds over every Nation: cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic,
Moving by compulsion each other; not as those in Eden, which
Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve, in harmony and peace. William Blake, Selections from ‘Jerusalem
Owen turned his factory in New Lanark Scotland into a kind of workers’ paradise ... New Harmony remember: Owen’s dream, still described to tourists today, was to set up a utopian socialist commune away from the factories and the exploitation. So when the tiny American settlement of New Harmony came up for sale he jumped at it. James Burke: Connections s2e11: New Harmony, BBC 1994
Queen Street Mill in Burnley: It’s home to over three hundred power looms, and it’s one of the first factories in the world. The Genius of Invention I, BBC 2013
By 1860 Lancashire produced half the cotton in the world. ibid.
Women who work in factories are slappers. The Office: Party s2e3, Gareth, BBC 2002
The women were sitting on the floor of the dimly lit room, pale fluorescent lights flickering overhead, each at a work station indicated by a numeral in red letters painting on the wall. They held the white shirts close to their eyes and stitched gold thread into them; they stopped when he came in. He flicked his wrist, indicating they should keep working. He didn't want their eyes looking at him: those eyes that were being damaged, as their fingers created golden shirts that he could sell to American ballroom dancers. Aravind Adiga, Between the Assassinations
He employed a great number of girls and young women who were supposed to be learning dressmaking, mantle-making or millinery. These were all indentured apprentices, some of whom had paid premiums of from five to ten pounds. They were ‘bound’ for three years. For the first two they received no wages: the third year they got a shilling or eighteenpence a week. At the end of the third year they usually got the sack, unless they were willing to stay on as improvers at from three shillings to four and sixpence per week.
They worked from half-past eight in the morning till eight at night, with an interval of an hour for dinner, and at half-past four they ceased work for fifteen minutes for tea. This was provided by the firm – half a pint for each girl, but they had to bring their own milk and sugar and bread and butter.
Few of these girls ever learned their trades properly. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
1The Pope closed down a lot of the factories that were making potatoes and turned them into prisons for children. Father Ted: Rock-a-Hula Ted s2e7, pop star on TV, Channel 4 1996
Cheap clothing: we go undercover in the factories making big high street brands, paying their workers less than half the national living wage. This isn’t Bangladesh or China, these are factories right here in the heart of Leicester in Britain. Dispatches: Undercover: Britain’s Cheap Clothes, Channel 4 2017
Dispatches went undercover in Leicester in 2010 we found factory workers being paid £2.50 an hour making clothes for high street fashion chain New Look. ibid.