Mr. Robert Owen calculates that two hundred arms, with machines, now
manufacture as much cotton as twenty millions of arms were able to
manufacture without machines forty years ago; and that the cotton now
manufactured in the course of one year, in Great Britain, would require,
without machines, sixteen millions of workmen with simple wheels. He
calculates further, that the quantity of manufactures of all sorts
produced by British workmen with the aid of machines is so great, that
it would require, without the assistance of machinery, the labour of
four hundred millions of workmen.
In the wool manufacture, machines possess an eminent advantage over
common wheels. The yarn on thirty or thirty-six spindles is all equally
twisted and drawn to the same degree of fineness. The most dexterous
spinners cannot twist so equally and so gently twenty slips of yarn from
wool of the same quality, as a machine can do twenty thousand.
At one of the cotton mills in Manchester yarn has been spun so fine, as
to require 350 hanks to weigh one pound avoirdupois. The perimeter of
the common reel being one yard and a half, 80 threads or revolutions
would measure 120 yards; and one hank seven times as much, or 840 yards,
which multiplied by 350, gives 294,000 yards, or 167 miles and a
fraction.
A steam-engine of the ordinary pressure and construction, with a
cylinder of thirty inches in diameter, will perform the work of forty
horses; and, as it may be made to act without intermission, while horses
will not work more than eight hours in the day, it will do the work of
one hundred and twenty horses; and as the work of a horse is equal to
that of five men, it will perform as much as six hundred men can; while
its whole expense is only equal to about half the number of horses for
which it is substituted.
The only purpose to which steam-engines were first applied was the
raising of water from coal-pits, mines, &c.; but they are now used for
many different purposes in which great power is required. Mr. Bolton
applied the steam-engine to his apparatus for coining; and, by the help
of four boys only, it was capable of striking thirty thousand pieces of
money in an hour; the machine itself was made to keep an accurate
account of the number struck off.
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