In the early modern period, water power continued to be used throughout the world for traditional purposes like milling grain and lifting water. By the late eighteenth century, however, water power was playing a crucial role in the early stages of industrialization. The Industrial Revolution is most often associated with the application of steam power to transportation and production, resulting in the rise of railways, steamships and factories. In fact, it was water, not steam, power that was the driving force behind the earliest stages of industrialization in Britain. Water-powered reciprocating devices operated trip hammers and blast furnace bellows in the iron industry—crucial to early industrialization. Waterwheels built in this period were often larger than their predecessors and constructed with iron rather than wood, generating more power and allowing for higher production.
It was in the textile industry that the industrial application of water power was
most fully realized in eighteenth-century Britain. In 1769, Richard Arkwright invented the “water frame,” a water-powered machine that spun cotton into yarn—a laborious, time-consuming process when done by hand. The water frame dramatically increased the efficiency of cotton spinning and set the stage for the production of textiles on an unprecedented scale. What was once undertaken on an individual basis at home was now accomplished by workers concentrated in a factory setting, invariably near a source of water power. The first cotton mill in Britain was established in 1771 in Derbyshire, and for the next two decades, Britain would have a virtual monopoly on water-powered spinning technology. Indeed, the water frame and other inventions were deemed so central to the national interest that the British government passed laws restricting the export of machinery and the emigration of people with intimate knowledge of industrial technology!
