PROTOTYPE – POWERING COTTONOPOLIS
Rodger describes how the expansion of the Lancashire cotton industry drove the development of more complex and efficient steam power for the mills.
The century between 1790 and 1890 saw massive change in the way cloth, and especially cotton cloth, was spun and woven, driven – literally – by the technology uplift from the application of steam power.
In England’s north west, Lancashire had been home to a textile industry for many years, individual weavers running what we today would call ‘artisan’ businesses. Lancashire’s textile industry was not just based around cotton – indeed wool, silk, flax were the products of the water-driven industry in the western valleys and small towns of the Pennines.
The raw material, imported through ports such as Liverpool, was transported by the newly dug canals to the mill towns, including Accrington, Blackburn, Bolton, Burnley, Bury, Chorley, Oldham, Preston, Rochdale, Salford, and of course Manchester. The growth of the mills was supported by an equal growth in the supply chain, from iron foundries, to workshops making specialist gearing, ropes, steam engines and boilers, and all manner of related machinery.
As the ‘Factory System’ took hold during the last years of the 18th and early years of the 19th century the Lancashire mills grew in both number and size, and with it, an equal demand for more power, to produce ever greater quantities of textiles – especially cotton. By 1853 Lancashire was home to the greatest number of cotton mills in the world, and Manchester, the world’s first industrial city, was awarded its title ‘Cottonopolis’ in 1854.
At the heart of this revolution, the innovators and pioneers were almost all Lancastrians – from Hargreaves (Oswaldtwistle), to Arkwright (Preston), Crompton (Bolton) and Kay (Bury) – and had been handloom weavers, yarn spinners, but closely allied to what was an industry driven by water. But those early inventions really benefited the handloom weavers, and it was not until the arrival of the power loom – accredited
“At the pinnacle
of the industry, more than 100,000 boilers were in daily use...”
to Edmund Cartwright – that much greater changes took place.
The multi-floored mills of the Factory System provided the opportunity to have those power looms and multiple spindle spinning machines in one place. But they needed driving by a system of ropes, gears, belts and shafts to operate each of the many machines – step forward the coal burning boiler and rotating steam engine. Changes in steam engine design from simple vertical layouts and beam engines, to rotating machinery and reciprocating motion were critical to the industrial revolution that was taking place.
Manchester’s Cottonopolis title remained firmly in place for the rest of the 19th century, and by the early 1890s, there were just under 1,800 cotton mills in Lancashire, including key locations such as Accrington, Bury, Burnley, Bolton, Manchester, Rochdale, Ramsbottom, Wigan, and many others. By the turn of the century all spinning and weaving was done with steam power, driving the looms and spinning machinery.
The Engine House
The engine house was the heart of the mill, and almost all of them were fitted with one or two double-flue Lancashire Boilers. This design was derived by William Fairbairn in 1844, and with two fire tubes provided a greater heating surface than the single-flue Cornish Boiler of Trevithick’s design that had already been put to use in the mining
industry. Alongside these steam producers were the engines that drove the line shafting across each of the floors, where spinning, roving, or weaving was carried out.
Sir William Fairbairn’s treatise on Mills and Millwork, published in 1878, provided a detailed overview of the development of the mill machinery and the arrangement of factories, boilers, gearing, pulleys – from water wheels and turbines to steam engines. The segment on steam engines included descriptions of various designs and arrangements, from the simple beam engines to early horizontal and vertical machines, which enabled greater power output, especially when deployed with condensing equipment.
As a testament to the importance of steam engine, Fairbairn made the following observation:
“To the steam engine in the first place, and subsequently to the improved machinery and mill-work, we may attribute the present gigantic extent of our manufactures. The factory system, which has supplanted the cottage manufacture, has enlarged the resources of the country far beyond those of any former period. This island stands pre-eminent in productive industry; and it is a source of pride and gratification to find that these blessings, springing out of the application of physico-mechanical science, have been attained by the skill and indomitable perseverance of our own countrymen.”
Lancashire engines
The majority of steam engines for the mills were built in Lancashire too, and the earliest of these came via a Scotsman named Alexander Petrie, who set up a foundry in Bury in 1792, later moving to Rochdale. There, as Alexander Petrie and Co., Ironfounders and Engineers, the company’s ‘Phoenix Works’ built its first 8hp steam engine in 1819. In the following year another, rated at 20hp was constructed for a John Whitworth of Facit.
According to one report, in the early years of the 19th century there were only seven steam engines in use in and around Rochdale, and many of the early designs were beam engines, with single-acting cylinders. As time passed, the limitations of the approach were superseded by horizontal designs, capable of higher powers, with less physical footprint in the engine house.
Boiler Design
Wrought-iron plates were used in the various designs of boiler that were produced, until steel became widely available in the 1880s. This in turn allowed increased steam pressure in the boiler, which in turn provided greater power to be made available to drive the mill machinery. To provide a saleable product, the boiler makers also needed to show their designs and construction techniques that provided a cost-effective means of powering the steam engines that drove the mill machinery.
Some early designs of boiler included just one smoke tube – as in the Cornish boiler – from front to back, whilst others included a ‘return flue’, or the ‘waggon top’ design – the equivalent of the ‘haystack’ design used on early railway locomotives. But by far the most widely used design was the twin-tube Lancashire Boiler. The mills’ boilers were manually fed with locally available coal as fuel
– and compared to other designs these boilers made better use of the lower calorific value fuel from the Lancashire coal fields.
The Lancashire Boiler design remained the principal source of power for the cotton industry until electrification took over, and even then the many engineering companies and foundries in the country were still the main suppliers of drives and power systems. At the pinnacle of the industry, more than 100,000 boilers were in daily use, despite the arrival of more efficient multi-tube and Scotch Boilers.
Sometimes small detail design changes offered some of the best improvements, including feed water heating through the use of economisers, which together with the use of compounding and condensing for the mill engines allowed increased output and efficiency for the mills.
Perhaps the most famous of those early suppliers of boilers and steam engines for mill, mine and factory use was Boulton & Watt, but as the industry grew, many more names started to appear, some of which became globally renowned, including W and J Galloway & Sons, Anderton and Sons, Tinker, Shenton & Co, Oldham Boiler Works and Hick, Hargreaves and Co.
One typical boiler manufacturer was the Oldham Boiler Works Co., which had been in existence since 1814, and by the mid to late 1800s had become a major supplier. Hick, Hargreaves & Co., manufactured at the Soho Iron Works in Bolton – right in the heart of the cotton industry area. Another was Tinker, Shenton and Co of Hyde, whose product remains in use today – with only minor modifications – at the preserved Queen Street Mill in Burnley, where the first boiler was installed back in 1894.
In that same year, the Oldham Boiler Works Co supplied the boilers to the ‘Lion Spinning Mill’ at Royton. Today the Lion Mill is a Grade II listed building, and stands in Fitton Street, Royton. Directly behind it is the site of the former ‘Bee Mill’, now
“Almost every mill town in Lancashire
had its own engine
maker...”
demolished and replaced with a range of small businesses.
An important development in boiler design was the inclusion by W and J Galloway of ‘Galloway Tubes’, which were effectively water tubes that ‘passed through’ the two furnace tubes to increase the heating surface of the boiler. Galloway manufactured all manner of machines, from lifting jacks, to shears, non-condensing steam engines to, of course, Galloway Boilers. The company was based in Manchester, and survived until 1932, almost 100 years, when all the records, drawings and patterns were purchased by Hick, Hargreaves & Co. – another major firm based in Bolton.
Steam Engines
The stationary steam mill engine evolved from the beam engine of around 1790, but by 1890, high-speed horizontal and vertical types were in widespread use, persisting until after the end of World War 2. It has been said that almost every mill town in Lancashire had its corresponding engine maker, and upwards of 10,000 steam engines were in use across the region until the arrival of electricity.
Many different designs were adopted – from the beam engine, with its complex supporting pedestals (entablature), to a single horizontal cast iron bedplate, supporting a single cylinder to drive the flywheel. The layouts developed further to include inverted engines with cylinders that were essentially upside down, those in diagonal form and ‘table’ engines, to the more compact, ‘enclosed’ designs. All could be found in the engine houses of Lancashire’s cotton mills.
The first beam engines were simple expansion designs, but at least one example can be found of a compound arrangement – the Cellarsclough Mill engine now preserved at the Bolton Steam Museum. This was based on an 1845 patent that doubled the power output by including a high-pressure cylinder between the flywheel crank and the centre pivot of the beam. The original cylinder then became the low-pressure cylinder.
Unsurprisingly Boulton & Watt was amongst the first makers of steam engines as well as boilers, but these were horizontal, reciprocating beam engine designs, providing the prime movers for most mills until around 1855-1860.
From around 1860 onwards the simple-expansion engine emerged, horizontally laid out and driving the attached flywheel from the crosshead, with an arrangement of links and levers to open and close the inlet and exhaust ports. Boulton & Watt also built the early compound beam engines, based on William
Mcnaught’s 1845 patent. One of the benefits of Mcnaught’s idea was that it could be retrofitted to existing simple-expansion beam engines.
For stationary engine use, the early simple-expansion designs needed to change, as increased power output and economy of operation were demanded by the mills, so designs turned to compounding. The obvious benefit was to use the steam twice, first under high pressure, which was then exhausted into a larger diameter lower pressure cylinder to employ the remaining energy in the steam. Numerous variations of the compound design were supplied, through triple and even quadruple expansion types, and either horizontal, vertical, or inverted vertical examples.
The difference in power demand depended mostly on whether spinning or weaving was being carried out. In a spinning mill, engines of 1,800 to 2,000hp would be needed, whilst a weaving shed might only need say 200 to 500hp – though these engines were still of a fair size.
When compounding arrived, further operational efficiencies were gained, along with greater power output, but although tandem compounds, with the cylinders in line on one side, provided some improvement, a smoother drive was possible with the cylinders on either side of the flywheel, the crosscompound. A variation of the design was the double cross-compound – the High Pressure (HP) and Low
Pressure (LP) cylinders were in line (tandem), on the same engine bedplate, and another pair of HP and LP cylinders were mounted on the other side of the flywheel.
Valve gear
Controlling the engine in the early days involved ‘gab’ gear, and slip eccentrics, which could be engaged or disengaged by the operator to enable the steam and exhaust ports in the steam chest to be opened using a D-shaped block – the slide valve – on the steam chest. This type of valve gear was also adopted on the earliest steam locomotives and was improved by Stephenson to become the valve gear which carries his name today. But probably the most innovative development to operate the engine itself was the Corliss valve gear.
This was patented by one George Henry Corliss, an American who, in 1849 developed a design using rocking cylindrical valves – four to each cylinder – to allow steam to enter and exit the cylinder. It provided a greater degree of expansive operation and efficiency, and was soon adopted for stationary mill engines.
It was not until the 1867 Paris
Exposition, however, that the Corliss Engine began to take a hold, and the British makers started to build them in greater numbers. Sometimes the Corliss valves were only fitted to the HP cylinders, with either slide or piston valves used on the LP side. Changes to the engine governor, to allow more responsive control of the inlet and exhaust, and the demand for higher-power engines was driven by the enormous growth in the cotton industry in particular.
Engine makers, as with boiler makers were many and varied, and some foundries and engineering works supplied everything from castings and gears to forged items, boilers, and complete steam engines. Names included J. and W. Mcnaught, J & E Wood, John Musgrave & Sons, Scott and Hodgson, Burnley Ironworks Co, Joseph Foster and Sons and W Roberts & Sons, some of which became globally renowned. The principal boiler makers became equally dominant in supplying steam engines for the mills, in particular Boulton & Watt and Hick, Hargreaves and Co.
Power transfer
The next step in the mill’s production process was of course to transfer the power generated to the spinning machines or looms. In the early days this was achieved by attaching a bevel gear to the mill wheel – in water powered mills – and linked to a vertical shaft reaching up the two, three or four floors of the building. At each floor a geared connection was made to horizontal line shafting, running the length of the floor, and with flat leather belts attached between the wheels mounted on the line shafts and the spinning machine or weaving loom.
Clearly the vertical shafting could also be used with bevel reduction gears attached to the steam engine’s flywheel, but the wear and heat generated on the lowest part of the vertical shafting would have been enormous, and it was inefficient. An alternative arrangement appearing from around 1870 was to drive the line shafting through ropes – made of cotton of course.
Since the mills now possessed much more efficient and powerful
“There was the clear danger of flat belts slipping, and some were retro-fitted with a layer of cork to
try and prevent this happening...”
steam engines, getting the drive to the individual floors was achieved by providing a ‘vee’ grooved engine flywheel, to which the ropes were attached. Via the ‘rope race’, the power was transmitted to the horizontal line shafts on each floor.
This arrangement remained the standard method for many years, and of course, there were numerous specialist rope makers in the Lancashire mill towns. A 2-inch diameter rope could transmit between 40 and 50hp, and a 40-grooved flywheel would be fitted to an
1,800hp engine.
No belt and braces
Some work was undertaken for a short time using flat belts with a composite or wide steel plate, but this did not see widespread use in the cotton mills. There was the clear danger of belts slipping, and where these flat belt drives were used, some were retrofitted with a layer of cork to try and prevent this happening. Rope drives were reliable and were the industrystandard transmission – at least until electricity arrived.
The stationary steam engines were undoubtedly the beating heart of the mills of Lancashire for almost a century, and reinforced Manchester’s title of ‘Cottonopolis’ for so long. In the mid-1800s the Lancashire cotton industry contributed some 40 per cent of the British economy, and Oldham and Bolton alone had more spinning capacity in their mills than the rest of the world combined.
Inevitably the decline eventually came, and it began in the 1930s. In, the post-world War 2 period the lack of investment and the arrival of man-made fabrics took their toll. Acquisitions, consolidation, mergers and cheap imports from the rest of the world saw the commercial demise of the Lancashire mill industry by the end of the 1960s.
Thanks to the efforts of many individuals and groups, and some far-sighted local and national organisations, today we can still see these amazing pieces of engineering design in museums, including many in operation. Numerous examples of the simple, compound, crosscompound, multi-cylinder horizontal, vertical enclosed and the machinery they drove have been preserved. These include – of course – working Lancashire boilers.
Many of these mill engine designs lend themselves well to the creative activity of our home workshops, and many models have been made in the past. Some, even the complex, compound double beam engines would make a great project to occupy the next year perhaps as we face spending even more time in our home workshops. I remember back at school (a fair few years ago!), when I did metalwork, our teacher offered us the opportunity to work on a model beam engine – a kit of castings by Stuart Turner I believe. Alas, I left school before the project was complete – maybe I should start again....