Public transportation was not existent and because of this a town would have to be built within walking distance of houses, schools, churches and shops. These towns were built surrounding the factories and soon because of the demand for workers, overcrowding would become a large problem. The demand for housing caused rents to be overpriced, most could not afford to rent more than just a part of a bed; a survey was done in London and its showed most families slept on one bed together. The overcrowding led to serious health problems, these were related to not having a clean water supply, proper sewage and waste disposal; sewage was dumped in canals, the drinking water was collected from the streams that were fed by the canals. The contaminated water caused diseases like typhoid and cholera to spread rapidly among the workers. The start of a new era was near, living in close proximity to factories and overcrowding would soon change. The growth of textile factories, transportation and iron making would make Britain the leader in the Industrial …show more content…
It was before the Industrial Revolution and the jobs in the country side of Britain were mostly farming or working in small workshops; cloth was made entirely by hand and cotton was spun into thread on a spinning wheel (Mantoux). In the 1700’s the demand for goods was increasing, factory owners were looking for faster and inexpensive ways of producing cloth. They turned to farms to hire young, raw and the inexperienced, which were glad to work for low wages (Mantoux). As the need for materials grew so would the population needed to make them. In was in the early eighteenth century that Great Britain would begin to dominate the textile industry with the invention of the spinning frame and the power loom. The spinning frame was a device that was powered by a waterwheel; it would be the first automatic powered textile machine. This new invention would be able to produce stronger threads for yarn (Bellis). The only setback was that the factories would have to be built by water to power the spinning frame with the waterwheels. Not long after to complement the spinning frame came the power loom. The power loom was steam powered and mechanically operated version of the regular loom; it would be able to combine thread to make cloth (Bellis). When the power looms became efficient, women replaced most men as weavers in the textile factories