Industrial Revolution: Banned Calico, Lombe's Silk Spying and 500x Spinning

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Around 1690 the finest cloth in a British shop was imported Indian cotton, made where labor cost about one fifth of British wages, and British wool and linen interests won the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721 to ban it. Lancashire answered with fustian, a blend of flax warp and cotton weft, because hand-spun cotton snapped under loom tension. Under the putting-out system four to eight spinners were needed to supply one handloom weaver. Britain's agricultural revolution, the enclosure acts, navigable rivers, shallow coal and iron, patent law and ready capital set the stage for the spinning jenny, the water frame and the spinning mule, which raised output per worker 500 times, while the power loom raised a weaver's output 40 times.

Knowledge spread through networks such as the Lunar Society of Birmingham and John Harris's 1704 Lexicon Technicum, and sometimes through theft: in 1721 John Lombe memorized Italian silk-throwing machines and built a five-story water-powered mill at Derby. James Watt's separate condenser and rotary motion, coke-fired blast furnaces and the cotton gin fed what historians call the Great Divergence. Yet historians such as Nicholas Crafts call the revolution a slow transition, Charles Feinstein found workers' living standards lagged for about a century, and by the late 1830s the boom stalled into recession.

• Britain imported about 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton in 1750 and 588 million pounds in 1850.
• Spindles in Britain rose from 50,000 in 1788 to 7 million about 30 years later.
• The Crown paid for models of Lombe's smuggled machinery and displayed them in the Tower of London.
• A Mexican cotton strain smuggled into Natchez, Mississippi, around 1806 became the parent of 90 percent of today's cotton.
• The phrase Industrial Revolution was first recorded in 1799 by French envoy Louis-Guillaume Otto and popularized by Arnold Toynbee in 1881.