Chapter 32

THE MARCH OF INDUSTRY

We can give but little idea of the advance in industrial artifice and appliances of all kinds made in the United States in the two decades after the Civil War. Take it first in textile manufacturing. A century earlier one person in every family had to work incessantly at spinning and weaving to keep the whole of them in clothing. Now one day's work a year per person sufficed for this. The speed of spindles had risen since 1860 from 5,000 to 7,500 revolutions a minute. Looms had gone from 120 picks to 160, and one hand tended from 25 to 50 per cent. more work. The "slasher" dresser accomplished ten times more than the old machine, supplying 400 looms in place of forty, and requiring to manage it only one man and a boy instead of two men and ten girls. A generation earlier one operative made three yards an hour, now he made ten. In the twenty years under survey the annual production of cotton mills rose from two and one-half to three and one-half tons per hand. One man formerly tended forty spindles, now he tended sixty. In 1890 a single operative in America could make cotton cloth enough to supply 1,500 persons.