Big engineering attracts most attention, but the promise of resolving larger questions about industrialization lies in the smaller-scale. Pre-factory engineering, particularly in subcontracting, innovation-chasing, cash-limited, resource-constrained textile engineering, holds all the interest. Without it, how could industrialization have happened at all? Machines were fundamental to industrial change in the eighteenth century. What we call the industrial revolution is not to be understood without appreciating how they came to be imagined and built.

Yet historians have not confronted early textile engineering. As a research topic, it has not found its place. Various approaches have been tried: this is a ‘submerged sector’ with virtually no useable sources, so as an industry it is unknowable beyond the familiar great men and famous firms; or it is a matter of technology, a question in metal and wood, nuts, screws and bolts, a progression towards mechanical efficiency, in which those same great men represent human input; or it is a sideshow of the textile industry, whose energy fed it and led it; or it was essentially quite static, operating in almost the same way at the end of the transformative century as it had at the beginning. As lines of enquiry, none of these is sufficient.

It is the outcomes of textile engineering which draw us in; that is, its products and their global impact. But these outcomes are not a route into understanding the hows and the whys of early textile engineering. Failures, culs-de-sac and false dawns are as much part of the process of discovery, indications of just what it took to succeed. Still there is no well-worked history of the engineering industry in the northern English textile districts – no study fully focused on the machine and component manufacturers who fed the booming needs of textiles before 1840. Nothing adequately pictures, in any depth, colour and glory, the progression, the chronological development, the speed of adoption, of textile technology in places at the eye of the storm of industrialization. Nor is much known about the social context within which technology was generated. Yet the surrounding culture – social, local, industrial, technical – was everything; its readiness to face uncertainty and complexity the key to innovating.