Temperature and Textiles: Heat Management in British Industrial Mills

This passage, taken from the British engineer Robertson Buchanan’s 1807 Essay on the Warming of Mills, illustrates the fundamental importance that the management of heat played in the development of largescale industry. Characterized by a multistory brick structure that was supported by a grid of cast iron columns, the textile mill provided the paradigmatic figure for industrial society that emerged in England at the end of the eighteenth century. 1 The mill was, as the economic theorist Andrew Ure states in his 1835 text The Philosophy of Manufactures, the sole place in which “the perfection of automatic industry” could be observed. 2 In the mill, he claimed, “the elemental powers have been made to animate millions of complex organs, infusing into forms of wood, iron, and brass an intelligent agency.” Ure’s almost magical description of mechanized production, however, elides a critical environmental and structural problem that shaped the trajectory of textile manufacture in England: the control of thermal energy within the interior space of the mill. For reasons that ranged from the delicacy of textile fibers to the brittleness of wooden and leather millwork, the productivity of the mills relied on the maintenance of a stable ambient temperature. This was made extremely challenging, however, by the architecture of the mill itself, which was defined by a continuous interior (an “open floor plan” in contemporary terms) designed to facilitate the division of labor and distribution of machinery necessary for mass production (Fig 1). By drastically reducing the effectiveness of interior solutions such as stoves and fireplaces, the multiplication of floor space encouraged the formulation of comprehensive heating systems. As industrial textile manufacture proliferated, heat created a specific tension between structure and program that encouraged the evolution of the mill.