The Beginning of the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1780

The two decades from 1760 to 1780 were the slow beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Although the changes of this period were modest in scale compared to what came later, they laid the foundations for the rapid transformation of the British economy in the following decades. The new machines and processes developed in these years established the principles that would govern industrialization for the next century.

The Spinning Revolution

The first clear sign of the new industrial age was the mechanization of the spinning of yarn, the first stage in the production of cloth. For centuries, yarn had been spun on the simple spinning wheel, with a single worker producing one thread at a time. The bottleneck in yarn production had become acute by the 1760s, especially for cotton, which was in great demand because of the popularity of Indian calicoes and muslins.

A series of inventions in the early 1760s broke the bottleneck. The spinning jenny, invented by James Hargreaves around 1764, allowed a single worker to spin eight threads at once, and later versions could spin many more. The water frame, patented by Richard Arkwright in 1769, used water power to drive a large number of spindles and produced a stronger yarn suitable for the warp of cloth. The spinning mule, developed by Samuel Crompton in the 1770s, combined the best features of the jenny and the water frame and produced a fine, strong yarn suitable for a wide range of cloths.

These inventions had several important effects. They dramatically increased the output of yarn, and they shifted the spinning process from the home to the workshop and the small mill. The water frame in particular was a key step in the development of the factory system, because it required a source of water power and therefore a large, fixed installation. Arkwright’s Cromford Mill, opened in 1771, is often taken as the model of the new factory.

The Steam Engine in the Mines

While the new spinning machines were transforming the textile industry, a parallel revolution was under way in the mining of coal. Coal was becoming increasingly important as a fuel for industry and for domestic heating, and the deeper seams that were being worked in the 1760s and 1770s were difficult to drain. The Newcomen atmospheric engine, which had been used in coal mines since the early 1700s, was inefficient and consumed large quantities of coal, partly defeating its own purpose.

It was in this context that James Watt began his work on the steam engine. Watt, then an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, was asked to repair a model Newcomen engine in 1764. He became fascinated by the engine’s inefficiency, and over the next few years he developed the idea of the separate condenser, which would dramatically reduce the engine’s fuel consumption. Watt’s first patent for the separate condenser was granted in 1769, and the first commercial Watt engines, built in partnership with Matthew Boulton, were installed in coal mines in the late 1770s.

Iron and the Smelting Revolution

The third area of significant change in this period was the iron industry. The smelting of iron required large quantities of charcoal, and the traditional British iron industry, based on charcoal, was increasingly limited by the shortage of wood. The breakthrough came in 1709, when Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire succeeded in smelting iron using coke made from coal. The technique spread slowly, but by the 1760s and 1770s, coke-smelted iron was becoming more common, especially in the coal-producing regions.

The substitution of coke for charcoal was not the only change in the iron industry. In the 1780s, just after the period covered by this article, Henry Cort developed the puddling process, which converted pig iron into wrought iron more cheaply and efficiently. The combination of coke smelting and puddling made possible a rapid expansion of British iron production in the following decades.

The Slow Take-Off

Despite the importance of these inventions, the period from 1760 to 1780 was one of slow change rather than rapid transformation. The new spinning machines were adopted widely, but most of them were still operated by hand in small workshops, not in large factories. The Watt steam engine was in use by 1780, but only in a few mines and ironworks, and most industrial power still came from water wheels. The railway did not yet exist, and the steam locomotive was still decades away.

Why did the transformation take so long to gather pace? Several factors contributed. The new machines were often unreliable and required constant maintenance. Capital was scarce, and many early industrial ventures were underfunded. Skilled labor was in short supply, and the new machines had to be operated by people who had no experience of them. And the social and legal arrangements of the time, including the apprenticeship system, the guilds, and the laws of settlement and poor relief, made it difficult to mobilize labor on the scale required by the new factories.

Foundations for the Future

The importance of the period from 1760 to 1780 is not that it saw a rapid transformation, but that it laid the foundations for one. The new machines and processes developed in this period established the principles that would govern industrialization for the next century: the use of inanimate power to drive machines, the concentration of workers in factories, the close connection between energy resources and industrial location, and the central role of inventors and entrepreneurs in driving technological change.

The two decades also produced the first generation of industrial capitalists. Richard Arkwright, who built the first water-powered cotton mills in the early 1770s, became one of the richest men in Britain. James Watt, working with Matthew Boulton, established the model of the research-based manufacturing firm that would later be copied by firms like Edison’s, Siemens’s, and many others. The success of these early industrialists encouraged others to invest in the new technology, and by the 1780s the pace of change was beginning to accelerate.

The slow beginning of the Industrial Revolution is also a reminder that major historical transformations do not happen overnight. The changes of 1760 to 1780 were not as dramatic as the changes of 1780 to 1840, but without them, the later transformation would not have been possible. The story of the Industrial Revolution is therefore a story of accumulation, of small improvements building on each other, and of slow change gradually accelerating into a transformation of the whole economy.

What It Teaches Us

The interesting current question about the 1760-1780 period is whether it was really the beginning. The traditional answer, going back to Arnold Toynbee’s coinage of the term “Industrial Revolution” in his 1884 lectures and given its modern form in T. S. Ashton’s The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (1948), is that the period after 1760 saw the take-off of the British economy: the spinning jenny, the water frame, the Watt steam engine, the coke-smelted iron. The revisionist answer, developed in a generation of cliometric work since 1980, is that the take-off is in the eye of the beholder: per-capita growth in 1760-1780 was modest (perhaps 0.3-0.5 percent per year), and the textile, iron, and steam technologies of the 1760s and 1770s were a small fraction of the British economy in 1780. The interesting current question, raised in Joel Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy (2009), is whether the 1760-1780 period should be read as a period of slow accumulation of useful knowledge (the period of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, the period of the Encyclopédie, the period of the British patent reform) that produced the conditions for the take-off, or as a period of rapid technological change whose economic consequences were simply slow to be felt. The two readings are not in conflict, but the 19th-century “take-off” framing — going back to Toynbee, given its modern form in W. W. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth (1960) — has the disadvantage of treating 1760-1780 as a kind of prologue, rather than as a period whose distinctive features (the Lunar Society, the Encyclopédie, the British patent reform) are themselves part of the explanation.

Selected Sources

T.S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution (1760–1830) (1948).
Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (1928).
Peter Mathias and John A. Davis (eds.), The First Industrial Revolutions (1989).
R.M. Hartwell, The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth (1971).