Revolution
The group hired a skilled mechanic named Paul Moody of Amesbury to develop and construct the machinery and to supervise the construction of the new mill.
After over a year of trials, Moody was able to bring Lowell's description of the power loom to fruition, making his own advancements along the way. It would be the perfection of Moody's power loom that would be the real "revolution" in American industry. For the first time, all phases of cloth production could be brought under one roof. Moody also developed a system of power transmission using a series of leather belts and pulleys powered by water turbines, that would prove much more efficient than the shaft and gear system then in use. The first mill was completed in late 1814, after almost a year of construction. Jacob Perkins was in charge of installing the first waterwheel, dam, flumes and raceway.
By early 1815, the cloth was sold. Production expanded quickly, as did profits. In 1816 a second larger mill was built next to the first mill. In addition to producing cloth, it also produced textile machinery for other companies. The two mills were later connected in 1843, as part of a planned expansion.
The power loom was soon copied by many other New England area mills, and modified and perfected along the way. Francis Cabot Lowell died in 1817, at age 42.
Read more about this topic: Boston Manufacturing Company
Famous quotes containing the word revolution:
“A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)
“This I do know and can say to you: Our country is in more danger now than at any time since the Declaration of Independence. We don’t dare follow the Lindberghs, Wheelers and Nyes, casting suspicion, sowing discord around the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt. We don’t want revolution among ourselves.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)