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Textile Bleaching and the Birth of the Chemical Industry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Klaus H. Wolff
Klaus H. Wolff
Affiliation:
Professor Of Economics, Middlebury College
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Abstract

During the early Industrial Revolution, the discovery and widespread commercial adoption of crucial technological advances permitted enormous productivity increases in the finishing of textiles and also marked the beginnings of the modern chemical industry in Europe.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , Summer 1974 , pp. 143 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1974

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References

1 For a summary of much of this work see Salter, W. E. G., Productivity and Technical Change (Cambridge, 1969)Google Scholar; Jewkes, John, Sawers, David, Stillerman, Richard, The Sources of Invention, 2nd Edition (New York, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mansfield, Edward, The Economics of Technical Change (New York, 1968)Google Scholar, as well as Blaug, Mark, “A Survey of the Theory of Process-Innovations,” Economica, XXX (February, 1963), 13–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Volume VI, I, Chapter 5, reprinted with additions as The Unbound Prometheus (London, 1969).

3 Clow, Archibald and Clow, Nan L., The Chemical Revolution; A Contribution to Social Technology (London, 1952).Google Scholar

4 Clow and Clow, The Chemical Revolution, above all Chapters II, III, VI, VIII, IX, XI and XII; Musson, A. E. and Robinson, Eric, Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Toronto, 1969)Google Scholar, particularly chapters VIII and X; Fester, Gustav, Die Entwicklung der Chemischen Technik (Berlin, 1923)Google Scholar; Haber, Ludwig Fritz, The Chemical Industry during the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1952)Google Scholar; Lunge, Georg, Handbuch der Soda industrie und ihrer Nebenzweige (Braunschweig, 1878)Google Scholar; Hardie, David William Ferguson and Pratt, J. Davidson, A History of the Modern British Chemical Indudstry (Oxford, 1966).Google Scholar The extensive bibliographies of these, which are only the more important sources, will clear up many obscure technical details.

5 History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London, 1966), 214.

6 Ibid., 248.

7 Not all of this output had to be bleached, of course. While any precise indication of how much woven or braided cotton and linen, or, for that matter, how much yarn could be used in a “gray” condition (at the very least, it had to be washed) is extremely difficult, it is quite evident that the demand for bleaching services also expanded exponentially.

8 See the careful calculations by Barker, T. C., Dickinson, R. and Hardie, D. W. F., “The Origins of the Synthetic Alkali Industry in Britain,” Economica, XXII (May, 1956) 158–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On Imports see L. Gittins, “Premiums for Vegetable Alkali — The Society and the Supply of Potash, Barilla, and Kelp, 1758–1827,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts (June, 1963), 577–581.

9 “On the Rise and Progress of the Cotton Trade,” read in 1815 to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, and quoted by Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 227.

10 The concept “industry” is particularly ill defined as regards textiles. Instead of referring to the bleaching business as a “branch” of the industry, the whole activity of finishing textiles could, just as well, if equally arbitrarily, be treated as an industry in its own right.

11 That is, detergents in the generic, rather than the modern supermarket sense.

12 A water supply of such quality is, of course, included in the term “land.”

13 Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, 108.

14 See the fascinating chapters “The Trade in Ashes and Kelp” and “The Scottish Bleaching Industry” in Clow and Clow, Chemical Revolution.

15 Even in the backwoods of Bohemia, the owners of forests would find more attractive uses for their lumber as soon as the bleacheries, owned by superior nobility, became even slightly lax in their requisitioning of potashes. See Kruenitz, Johann Georg, Oeconomische Encyclopaedie (Berlin, 1773–1799), vol. 76Google Scholar, Leinen. Land rents in all industrializing areas and regions were rising. For Lancashire see Aikin, John, A Description of the Country from thirty to forty Miles around Manchester (London, 1795), 211ff.Google Scholar

16 I have found only one long-run series of prices for ashes so far. This is an unpublished series for “muscovite weedash” from Riga to Holland, running from 1750 to 1808, found in the Economisch-Historische Bibliotheck, Amsterdam, courtesy of I. J. Brugmans and Dr. A. Stolp. For additional evidence and comments, see all of the following: “from 1740 to 1750 pot and pearl ashes have risen from £16 to £25 per ton,” testimony by Cadwallader Colter, soapmaker, in the Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 25 (May 20, 1751), 240, quoted in Barker, Dickinson, and Hardie, “Origins of Synthetic Alkali,” 163. Numerous new potash burnings were established in the forest regions of Germany during the latter half of the eighteenth century due to rising prices; see Fester, Entwicklung der chemischen Technik, 80. From 1775 to 1780 the price of sodas (barilla) rose from 9.33 dutch guilders to 22.75 and potashes from 12.55 to 23.40 on the Amsterdam market; Hardie and Pratt, History of the Modern British Chemical Industry, 20, “Soda… becomes every day more rare,” declared Fourcroy's 1789 text on chemistry quoted on p. 21 of ibid. “Every article in the crofting [bleaching] line is so considerably advanced… at the present high prices of articles used in bleaching,” noted an advertisement in the Manchester Mercury of May 5, 1795. A German publication remarked in 1800 about “the ever rising prices of ashes because of the dearth of timber and the growing cost of transport;” Westrumb, Johann Friedrich, Bemerkungen: Vorschlaege fuer Bleicher (Hanover, 1800), 131.Google Scholar Finally, Samuel Parkes wrote in 1815 that “owing to a deficiency of wood in those provinces where potash has usually been made, the produce has gradually decreased and the article has every year become more and more adulterated… owing to the high price of foreign barilla.” Parkes, Samuel, Chemical Essays (London, 1815), IV, 32–33 and 93–94.Google Scholar Indirect evidence is also provided by the rising imports from North America, in L. Gittins, “Premiums for Vegetable Alkali,” 580.

17 “During the summer, men, women, and children are constantly employed in cutting and burning ferns on the sides of the moors, the ashes of which are sold.” Aikin, A Description, 474. For England, Scotland, and Ireland there was temporary, and inadequate relief from the worsening shortages and rising prices through the collection of seaweed and its incineration into “kelp.” This product, due to its high salt content, was most suitable for the soapboilers and was widely used by them (initiating the migration of the English soap industry from London to Liverpool). It was less useful to the glassmakers, and of very little help to the bleachers. See Clow and Clow, Chemical Revolution, Ch. III, as well as Barker, Dickinson and Hardie, “Origins of Synthetic Alkali,” 161.

18 Any timber sufficiently close to rivers and waterways to make it economical to ship to market as lumber had, of course, a positive and high value. The only method, on the other hand, of obtaining a return from timber beyond the economic limits of transport was to turn it into “naval stores” (pitch, tar, turpentine, or ashes), products which weighed approximately only one-five hundredth of the weight of the wood used to produce them. In this sense, and, of course, only in this sense, can one speak of negligible opportunity costs for forest products.

19 John Aikin, A Description, 211ff. Erxleben, Christian P. F. in Die boehmische Leinwandbleiche (Wien, 1812), 243–244Google Scholar, discusses the impossibility of shifting away suitable land from existing uses, mostly mills, except through the power of eminent domain. The Board of Trustees for Fisheries, Manufactures, and Improvements in Scotland offered a subsidy of £50 per acre to those who would lay out new bleach fields of up to forty acre size. See Campbell, R. H., Scotland since 1707 (Oxford, 1965), 60.Google Scholar In Barmen-Elberfeld, an important textile area in northern Germany, the bleach fields along the rivers Wupper and Ruhr had an extremely high opportunity cost. See Daebritz, Walther, Die Goldschmidt A. G., Neun Jahrzehnte (Essen, 1937).Google Scholar

20 See the revealing picture in Clow and Clow, Chemical Revolution, 193 and their discussion of the smoke nuisance, 113.

21 Ibid., Chapter VI; Haber, Chemical Industry, Chapters 1 and 7, bibliography and bibliographical note; Daebritz, Goldschmidt A. G., which is one of the few valuable company histories in German that Haber seems to have missed.

22 See Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology, 252, and Clow and Clow, Chemical Revolution, Chapter VI, for the names of other scientists and further details on “Vitriol” and its history and uses.

23 For probably the most detailed account see Georg Lunge, Handbuch der Soda industrie. English translations appeared in 1886, 1896, and 1903.

24 It is amusing to reflect that in the English language the commercial trade names have persisted, latinized as sodium and potassium in the face of differing scientific chemical nomenclature of Natrium (Na) and Kalium (K) respectively.

25 Soda, more precisely Sodium Carbonate (Na2CO3) was made by combining salt (NaCl) with sulphuric acid (H2SO4). This yields as the first intermediate product sodium sulphate or “saltcake” (Na2SO4), which had at that time as much common currency as its related Epsom Salt has today. (This was Dr. Glauber's [Johann Rudolf Glauber, 1604–1668] healthful emetic.) In the process, chlorine is driven off, and turns immediately into hydrochloric acid (HCI) unless manganese (MnO2) is added. This yields manganous oxide (MnO) or manganous chloride (MnCl2) and pure gaseous chlorine to be absorbed by dry calcium power to yield bleaching power (a mixture of calcium chlorite and hydrochlorite) or by a watery potassium or sodium solution to yield bleach liquor (“Eau de Javelle”), the potassium or sodium hypochlorite solution as commonly sold to this day as “CLOROX” or any other household bleach. The first intermediate product “saltcake” (sodium sulphate) must be calcined with lime and coal to obtain the usable soda (sodium carbonate). For the reader who desires more on the chemistry and industry of this, all the sources cited in note 4 above and subsequently will provide extensive information.

26 See Ashmore, Owen, The Industrial Archeology of Lancashire (Newton Abbot, 1969), 58ffGoogle Scholar for a map of bleachers' locations and the ground plan of a bleach work.

27 See the very important article by Barker, Dickinson, and Hardie, “The Origins of Synthetic Alkali,” as well as Gillespie, C. C., “The Discovery of the Leblanc Process,” Isis, XLVIII (June, 1957), 152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Hardie and Pratt, History of the Modern British Chemical Industry, 32, calculated from the recorded amount of salt decomposed and the different reported uses of acid, that some 45 per cent of all hydrochloric acid was more or less discreetly dumped by the soda makers as late as 1867!

29 Haber, Chemical Industry, 57.

30 Ibid., Chapter 7, and Clow and Clow, Chemical Revolution, 194.

31 Wolff, Klaus, “Pioneer Entrepreneurs in Industry” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1959), 134.Google Scholar

32 The decisive discussion of this issue is the one by Barker, Dickinson, and Hardie, “Origins of Synthetic Alkali,” 158–171, Gillespie, “The Discovery of the Leblanc Process,” has added significantly to this clarification.

33 Evidence for the universal accessability of technical knowledge is provided by an eight-page bibliography with English, French, and German descriptions of every conceivable refinement in the bleaching of linens and cottons with acids and chlorine published at the turn of the century in Germany. See Wilhelm H. von Kurrer's several articles in Dingler's Polytechnisches Journal (Stuttgart) Volume III, 2 (1817) 198–208 and VIII, 1 (1822) 51–103 and 155–183.

34 There are repeated references in contemporary sources to the (entirely understandable) reluctance to abandon materials which one knew from long experience in favor of the new and untried.

35 “The release of land for agricultural purposes [in Scotland, where hundreds of acres of field were covered with bleaching fabrics] was heralded as one of the great benefits conferred by chemistry upon the community.” Clow and Clow, Chemical Revolution, 172. During the famine of 1818 the extensive bleach greens around the city of St. Gallen in Switzerland were plowed and cultivated for gardens. See Buergin, A., Geschichte des Geigy Unternehmens von 1758 bis 1939 (Basel, 1958).Google Scholar

36 Gill, Conrad, The Rise of the Irish Linen Industry Oxford, 1925), 247Google Scholar, mentions the dramatic increase in output of bleacheries around Belfast from an average of 4,400 pieces in 1782 to 11,400 pieces each already by 1810 and the consequent radical decline in the number of bleach greens.

37 Aikin, A Description, passim.

38 See the literature on technical change in Mansfield, The Economics of Technical Change, Chapter II.

39 See below: “The costs of employing the new chemical technology.”

40 France, according to Chaptal, J. A., L'industrie francaise (2 vols., Paris, 1819)Google Scholar spent 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 francs on Spanish barilla annually in the 1790s, and almost 2,000,000 francs on potashes. Ireland alone, in the same period spent well over 100,000 pounds each for barilla and potashes. See Higgins, W., An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Bleaching (London, 1799).Google Scholar England, in the one year of 1801 spent over 300,000 pounds on barilla and over 400,000 on pot and pearl ashes. See Parkes, Samuel, Chatechism of Chemistry (London, 1818).Google Scholar See also Gittens, “Premiums for Vegetable Alkali,” 580. The U.S., primarily the states of New York and Massachusetts, exported pot and pearl ashes worth almost $840,000 from 1789–1790. See American State Papers (Washington, 1832), VIII, 24–25. While this is anything but a comprehensive list, it does give some impression of the magnitudes involved in this rarely mentioned aspect of international trade.

41 Barilla and ashes paid duty in England and salt an excise. The French gabelle was abolished in 1790, the English excise in 1824, and the last German state did not abolish the tax on industrially used salt until 1868.

42 Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology, Chapter VIII.

43 The distribution of bleach liquor (“Eau de Javelle”) commercially was successful only in rare cases.

44 Salter, Productivity and Technical Change, 133.

45 A simple way to trace this evolution is to read the eminently knowledgeable articles on the techniques of bleaching in successive editions of The Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1771 on. Edward Baines, incidentally, in his highly respected History of the Cotton Manufacture, acknowledges his debt to the Brittanica for his chapter on the finishing trades.

46 See Clow and Clow, Chemical Revolution; Fester, Die Entwicklung; Haber, The Chemical Industry; Hardie and Pratt, History of the Modern British Chemical Industry, and the excellent bibliographies therein, particularly in Haber.

47 Both in the Bolten (near Manchester, England) area at Dunscar and Halliwell respectively. See the map in Ashmore, Industrial Archeology, 59. The first valuation is reproduced in SirSykes, A. J., Concerning the Bleaching Industry (Manchester, 1925), 114–115Google Scholar from the original in the Public Library of Stockport, England. The second, undated, but from some time after 1830 or 1831 according to internal evidence, is in the Manuscript Collection of the Museum and Art Gallery, Civic Center, Bolton, Lanes., and my thanks are due to the Keeper of Archeology there for making it available.

48 The ground plan of a (different) large bleach works is reproduced in Ashmore, Industrial Archeology, 63.

49 For an evaluation of Leblanc's true standing in this development, see Gillespie, “The Discovery of the Leblanc Process.”

50 Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology, 253, elucidate the chemists' dilemma.

51 ibid.

52 Salter, Productivity and Technical Change, 133.

53 Musson and Robinson, Science and Technology, Chapter VIII; Crathorne, Nancy, Tennant's Stalk; The Story of the Tennants of the Glen (London, 1973).Google Scholar

54 The author requests that anyone knowing of additional sources of an economic and business (rather than a technical) nature bearing on the general topic of this article please make the information available to him. He is especially interested in such data as price series for chemical inputs such as potash and barilla, as well as detailed inventory valuations for textile finishing enterprises in the relevant period.