The Textile Machinery Collection, Science Museum (review)

Museum Review The Textile Machinery Collection, Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD. Open weekdays 10:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. and Sundays 2:20 p.m. until 6:00 p.m. Closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Year’s Day. Admission free. The Collection Description An accurate and comprehensive assessment of all the holdings in the textile department of the Science Museum, Britain’s foremost state-supported museum of science and technology, is difficult to make. The department has a card index and accession files on each of its artifacts, but I did not have time to examine these closely. Conse­ quently my assessment is based on the department’s publications, its public exhibit which represents about 40 percent of the textile col­ lection, and discussions which I had in 1971 with Mr. K. R. Gilbert, Keeper (curator) of Mechanical and Civil Engineering until his tragic death in 1973, and with Mr. A. K. Corry, the Assistant Keeper pres­ ently in charge of textile machinery. The department’s publications permit a very limited view of the whole collection. The only comprehensive catalog, published over fifty years ago, is now out of print: Board of Education, Catalogue of the Collections in the Science Museum, South Kensington, with Descriptive and Historical Notes and Illustrations: Textile Machinery (London: H.M.S.O., 1921). Its eighty pages provided descriptions of 153 ar­ tifacts acquired by the department after the museum’s opening in 1857. Since 1921 two Science Museum booklets dealing with the tex­ tile collection have been published, both written by K. R. Gilbert: Sewing Machines (London: H.M.S.O., 1970) and Textile Machinery (London: H.M.S.O., 1971). These two forty-page booklets, very at­ tractively illustrated with twenty full-color photographs each, were designed as guides to the exhibit. In addition to these three publica­ tions, the Museum issues duplicated lists of photographs of artifacts which may be purchased by the public. One ofthese lists covers textile machinery and offers some up-to-date enumeration of the more significant objects in the collection. All these sources provide a description of the broad dimensions of 70 Textile Machinery Collection 71 the collection, which amounts to over 2,000 items. First, and obvi­ ously, the collection deals primarily with British textile technology. Within this orbit it covers yarn production, weaving, knitting, and finishing processes of cotton, woolen, worsted, flax, silk, man-made fiber manufacturing. Domestic sewing machines are also included. The strengths of the collection derive from its historical develop­ ment, since a good proportion of the artifacts were acquired at a time when Britain’s manufactures led the world. According to “Photo­ graphic List No. 50” (April 1975), two-thirds of the significant cotton manufacturing equipment were obtained by the museum between 1857 and 1921. Consequently some of the most valuable items in the collection date from the beginnings of modern industrialization in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Outstanding is the group of early cotton preparatory and spinning machines: Arkwright’s spinning machine patented in 1769 and later known as the water frame; a slightly later version of the same machine incorporating interesting stop and builder motions (see the illustration); and a carding machine and a drawing or lantern frame, both based on Arkwright’s 1775 patent. A copy of an early Crompton spinning mule (fig. 3) is another rarity. In addition there are a union card offlats and rollers and a num­ ber of patent models, including some made for that prolific inventor and engineer Johann Georg Bodmer during the 1820s and 1830s. In­ cluded in the latter is a railway drawing head that antedates the Ameri­ can model. The sewing machine collection, consisting of eighty pieces, is the other forte of the department. It includes the 1874 model of Thomas Saint’s machine, patented in 1790 and the first sewing machine in­ vented; a copy of Howe’s original sewing machine of 1845; one of the first Singer sewing machines (1854); and examples of some of the most advanced models currently available. Criticism From the evidence, noted above, it would appear that the objectives and limits

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