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Arkwright’s Cotton Mill This moonlit landscape cradles a multi-windowed building. The seemingly insignificant building has regularly patterned lit windows, made more apparent by the dark structural shape and landscape surrounding them. Sharing the building's central vertical axis is a cart and wagon in the foreground, a large moonlit cloud and brightly silhouetted moon directly above the building. To the left of the building, hills gently fall into the center middle ground. A moonlit walled path leads the viewer's eye into the hills. To the right, a larger hill and its greenery - silhouetted in the moonlight - overshadows the central structure. The dark evening sky, cloud forms barely visible, balances the darkened foreground area. Background Richard Arkwright, developer of a water frame powered by a waterwheel, constructed Cromford Mill, on the River Derwent, in Derbyshire. The water frame made stronger lengthwise cotton warp threads to be used in textile looms. This was the first cotton mill purposely built to house working spinning machines, spinning four spindles of cotton threads at a time. Arkwright's mill was new, employed many people, and created a new economy. The drama of working long hours and into the night was exemplified through the artist's concept of painting the moonlit scene. The term Factory, in technology, designates the combined operation of many orders of work people, adult and young, in tending with assiduous skill a system of productive machines continuously impelled by a central power. This definition includes such organizations as cotton mills, flax mills, silk mills, woolen mills, and certain engineering works; but it excludes those in which the mechanisms do not form a connected series, nor are dependent on one prime mover. Of the latter class, examples occur in iron works, dye works, soap works, brass foundries, etc…I conceive that this title, in its strictest sense, involves the idea of a vast automation, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinated to a self regulated moving force…The principle of the factory system then is, to substitute mechanical science for hand skill, and the partition of a process into its essential constituents, for the division or graduation of labour among artisans. Steam engines…create a vast demand for fuel; and, while they lend their powerful arms to drain the pits and to raise the coals, they call into employment multitudes of miners, engineers, shipbuilders, and sailors, and cause the construction of canals and railways: and, while they enable these rich fields of industry to be cultivated to the utmost, they leave thousands of fine arable fields free for the production of food to man, which must have been otherwise allotted to the food of horses. Steam engines moreover, by the cheapness and steadiness of their action, fabricate cheap goods, and procure in their exchange a liberal supply of the necessaries and comforts of life, produced in foreign lands.
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