mechanized weaving. Building on the flying shuttle, Edmund
Cartwright introduced the power loom in 1785, a first step
in a series of innovations that would lead to machines
replacing manual skills in weaving as they were also doing
in spinning.
The English textile industry not only was the driving force
behind the Industrial Revolution but also revolutionized the
world economy. English exports, led by cotton textiles,
doubled between 1780 and 1800. It was the growth in this
sector that pulled ahead the whole economy. The
combination of technological and organizational innovation
provides the model for economic progress that transformed
the economies of the world that became rich.
New people with new ideas were crucial to this
transformation. Consider innovation in transportation. In
England there were several waves of such innovations: first
canals, then roads, and finally railways. In each of these
waves the innovators were new men. Canals started to
develop in England after 1770, and by 1810 they had linked
up many of the most important manufacturing areas. As the
Industrial Revolution unfolded, canals played an important
role in reducing transportation costs for moving around the
bulky new finished industrial goods, such as cotton textiles,
and the inputs that went into them, particularly raw cotton
and coal for the steam engines. Early innovators in building
canals were men such as James Brindley, who was
employed by the Duke of Bridgewater to build the
Bridgewater Canal, which ended up linking the key
industrial city of Manchester to the port of Liverpool. Born in
rural Derbyshire, Brindley was a millwright by profession.
His reputation for finding creative solutions to engineering
problems came to the attention of the duke. He had no
previous experience with transportation problems, which
also was true of other great canal engineers such as
Thomas Telford, who started life as a stonemason, or John
Smeaton, an instrument maker and engineer.
Just as the great canal engineers had no previous
connection to transportation, neither did the great road and
railway engineers. John McAdam, who invented tarmac
around 1816, was the second son of a minor aristocrat.
The first steam train was built by Richard Trevithick in 1804.
Trevithick’s father was involved in mining in Cornwall, and