Voice of Conscience

I found interesting that as mentioned in the second paragraph it states "While before many goods were produced by skilled craftsmen the use of modern machinery increased the demand for semiskilled and unskilled workers." this I believe is what drove the demand for slaves in the southern U.S. grew. As the demand for cotton increased the number of plantations increased hence the need for unskilled workers.
Edmund Cartwright after patenting his invention attempted to set up a factory in Doncaster, England but went bankrupt within a few years. This was not due to any defect in his invention but a lack of business knowledge on his part. The Power Loom when used in conjunction with Samuel Crompton’s Spinning Mule in many factories.
Power looms were operated successfully in the early 1800's but the ones made in the U.S. were defincient. Francis Cabot Lowell visited English textile mills and used the technology he learned there to improve the American made model to be more dependable so that weaving could keep up with the production the of spinning of cotton.
With the invention of the steam engine by James Watt in 1776 and applied to the application of spinning cotton in 1785 the ability to increase production over the use of the Water Frame and allowed for more diversity in factory sites because a constant water source was no longer required.
http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventors/a/power_loom.htm
In the England of the 18th century five important inventions in the textile industry advanced the automation of work processes. 1) John Kay's flying shuttle in 1733 , which permitted the weaving of larger widths of cloth and significantly increased weaving speed, 2) Edmund Cartwright's power loom in 1785, which increased weaving speed still further, 3) James Hargreaves' spinning jenny in 1764, 4) Richard Arkwright's water frame and 5) Samuel Crompton's spinning mule in 1779, whereby the last three inventions improved the speed and quality of thread-spinning operations. Those developments, combined with the invention of the steam engine, in short time led to the creation of new machine-slaves and the mechanization of the production of most major goods, such as iron, paper, leather, glass and bricks.Large-scale machine production was soon applied in many manufacturing sectors and resulted in a reduction of production costs. Yet the widespread use of the novel work-slaves also led to new demands concerning the work force's qualifications. The utilization of machines enabled a differentiated kind of division of labor and eventuated in a specialization of skills. While before many goods were produced by skilled craftsmen the use of modern machinery increased the demand for semiskilled and unskilled workers. Also, the nature of the work process altered from one mainly dependent on physical power to one primarily dominated by technology and an increasing proportion of the labor force employed to operate machines. http://world-information.org/wio/infostructure/100437611663/100438659368/?opmode=history