We think of mechanization in the early nineteenth century and we think cotton; we also need to think textiles. When considering the application of mechanics, pneumatics, and hydrostatics, we turn to steam engines in cotton factories, or engineering plans for canals or the dredging of harbors, or the raising of water from North Country coal mines or London’s Thames. We also associate all those applications of power technology with the scientific culture and experimental habits that took root in eighteenth-century Britain. We can also witness scientifically informed, factory-based experimentation being taken up in the woolen and linen industries.

The lives of textile industrialists, rather like M’Connel and Kennedy in cotton, allow us to document the debt early manufacturers in linen and woolen cloth owed to mechanical science and chemistry. Where new machines and new applications of existing machines became the goal, science and technology were closely intermingled, not hierarchically but dynamically, never one and the same thing, but never far apart. We may even describe the textile entrepreneurs as “hybrid savant-technologists.” By 1800 they and their Yorkshire factories provide yet another example of a distinctive form of scientific culture, sometimes called “techno-science,” present far earlier than the twentieth-century associations of the term would suggest. In the critical first generation of mechanization that began in the 1780s, linen and wool manufacturers in Leeds – like their counterparts in Manchester cotton – deployed scientific knowledge of a mechanical sort, and chemistry, to assist in the invention of new industrial processes and forms of industrial life.