The History of Cloth — A two-part series

• Part 1: From Natural Materials to Fiber
• Part 2: From Nature’s Thread to Human-Made Fiber (current)

The History of Cloth Part 2: From Nature’s Thread to Human-Made Fiber

In 1768, an angry crowd gathered at the market cross in Blackburn, a small town in Lancashire, England. From there, they marched to the nearby village of Stanhill and smashed twenty spinning machines being built in a barn for a local weaver.^[1] The wrecked machines were James Hargreaves’s “spinning jenny.” The crowd was made up of hand spinners who earned their living turning a spinning wheel, and they were convinced this new machine was about to take their livelihood away entirely. But there’s an interesting detail here: they didn’t smash everything in sight. Small jennies with twenty spindles or fewer — considered a scale one spinner could reasonably handle alone — were left untouched, while only the larger machines were destroyed.^[1] After the incident, Hargreaves left Lancashire for Nottingham, where he was finally granted a patent in 1770.^[1]

This wasn’t simple vandalism. It was a precisely targeted act of resistance, aimed at the exact moment when control over spinning thread was passing from human hands to machines. Part 1 traced how humans bred sheep and domesticated cotton, reshaping nature’s raw materials themselves. But changing the material alone wasn’t enough. The speed at which that material could be spun into thread was still bound to the pace of human hands, and the attempt to break past that limit is exactly what triggered the clash in that Blackburn barn.

Detaching the Speed of Spinning from Human Hands

Hargreaves’s spinning jenny is believed to have been devised sometime between 1764 and 1765.^[2] The principle was simple. Unlike the traditional spinning wheel, which used a single spindle to draw out one thread at a time, the jenny let one person operate eight spindles at once. Work that used to take one hand could now be done eight times over by that same hand. The thread the jenny produced was weak, though — too weak to serve as the tightly stretched warp threads running the length of a fabric, but usable as the weft threads running crosswise.

Around the same time, Richard Arkwright took a completely different approach. His “water frame,” patented in 1769, turned spindles using the power of a waterwheel instead of a human hand.^[3] In effect, he replaced the limits of a hand that tires and stops with the continuous flow of water. This machine spun 96 threads at once, and because the thread was pulled with real force, it was strong enough to be used as warp as well. But powering a waterwheel meant building a large structure on a site with flowing water. So in 1771, Arkwright built a mill at Cromford in Derbyshire — not a workshop where laborers were simply gathered together, but a building designed from the ground up around the machines themselves.^[3] Working hours, too, shifted away from the rhythm of sunrise and sunset and came to be governed instead by the clock on the factory wall.

The jenny was light and cheap but produced weak thread; the water frame produced strong thread but was large and expensive. In 1779, Samuel Crompton combined the two.^[4] He named his invention the “spinning mule” — after the mule, the hybrid offspring of a horse and a donkey — a name that captured exactly what he’d done: blending the strengths of both machines. Crompton’s first machine had 48 spindles and produced one pound of fine yarn a day, and crucially, that yarn was thin enough and strong enough to serve as both warp and weft.^[4] Until then, spinners had always had to sacrifice either strength or fineness — the mule eliminated that trade-off entirely. In 1785, Edmund Cartwright patented the power loom, mechanizing weaving itself, so that both spinning thread and weaving that thread into cloth had now passed out of human hands.^[4]

What matters here isn’t the name or date of any single machine. Until this point, the output of a single thread had always been set by how much one person could spin by hand in a day. If you wanted more cloth, the only option was to hire more spinners. But once these machines arrived, the output of thread stopped being tied to the number of people involved. Production could now grow simply by increasing the number of spindles one person could operate and the power driving those spindles. This was exactly what the spinners of Blackburn feared. The value once held in their skilled hands was shifting to a new question entirely: who owned the machines.

Faster Thread, and the Balance the Cotton Field Broke

As machines pushed up the speed of spinning, a bottleneck appeared somewhere else entirely. Cotton grows as fluffy fiber wrapped around its seeds, and before that fiber could be spun into thread, the seeds had to be picked out of it, one by one. Done by hand, separating a single pound of cotton fiber from its seeds could take one person a full ten hours.^[5] No matter how fast the spinning machines got, they’d sit idle if raw material couldn’t be supplied at that pace.

The bottleneck was broken in 1793 by Eli Whitney, an American inventor who devised the cotton gin. Whitney filed his patent application that October and received the patent the following March.^[6] Using rotating brushes and teeth to separate seeds from fiber, the machine let two or three people process up to 50 pounds a day — work that had once taken one person an entire day just to process a single pound.^[5][6] U.S. cotton exports, which had stood at under 150,000 pounds before the gin, surpassed 18 million pounds within just a few years of its introduction.^[6]

Here, the direction history took runs against common assumption. Whitney himself expected the gin to reduce human labor — he believed it would eliminate the tedious work of picking seeds out by hand.^[6] What actually happened was the exact opposite. Once the gin removed the bottleneck of seed separation, the bottleneck simply shifted to the fields, to the work of picking cotton itself. Mechanical cotton pickers didn’t appear until the 1930s, so for decades in between, harvesting remained entirely dependent on human hands.^[6] As a result, plantation owners planted more cotton, and bought more people to pick it. The enslaved population in the United States grew from roughly 700,000 in 1790 to roughly 3.2 million in 1850, while cotton production over the same period jumped from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850.^[6] An invention meant to reduce labor ended up expanding the industrial body that sustained slavery. Historians still debate exactly how much weight the cotton gin alone carried in the expansion of slavery. But there’s no disagreement about the direction: the gin didn’t shrink slavery — it broadened its economic foundation.^[6]

This dependence on enslaved-grown cotton eventually reached back across the Atlantic and struck the very town where this story began. When the American Civil War cut off cotton shipments to Britain between 1861 and 1865, Lancashire’s mills — the same industry that had grown up around Hargreaves’s machines in Blackburn — ran short of raw material almost overnight, and at the depth of what came to be called the Lancashire Cotton Famine, roughly 60 percent of the region’s textile workers were out of work.^[15] Even so, cotton workers meeting in Manchester in December 1862 voted to support the Union’s fight against slavery, despite the hardship that stance was inflicting on their own families — a moment of working-class solidarity that British historians still point to today.^[15]

Rayon — the First Attempt to Manufacture Thread in a Laboratory

Even as spinning machines drew thread faster and the cotton gin fed them raw material faster, the material itself still came from a sheep, a cotton plant, or a silkworm. Only the speed of processing natural material had changed — the source of the material hadn’t. The person who first broke that pattern was the French chemist Hilaire de Chardonnet.

While working with cellulose nitrate solution in a photography darkroom, Chardonnet noticed that as the substance dried, it hardened into a fiber as fine and sticky as thread. He patented the discovery in 1884.^[7] When he first unveiled the fiber at the 1889 Paris Exposition, he called it “Chardonnet silk” — artificial silk.^[8] In 1891, he built a factory in Besançon, France, and began actual commercial production.^[7] It was the first commercial thread ever made not from cotton or wool, but from a chemically processed substance.

Calling this fiber a “fully synthetic fiber,” though, isn’t quite accurate. Unlike nylon or polyester, which link together molecules extracted from petroleum to create a substance that never existed in nature, this fiber simply took cellulose — a substance already found in wood — and chemically dissolved and re-hardened it into fiber form. So this category of fiber is called a “regenerated fiber”: the raw material comes from nature, but the process that turns it into thread happens in a chemical plant.

Chardonnet’s invention had a serious flaw. Cellulose nitrate is also a raw material used in gunpowder, which made it highly flammable, and clothing made from this fiber was genuinely dangerous to wear.^[8] This drove other chemists to search for a safer method, and in 1892, three Englishmen — Cross, Bevan, and Beadle — patented an alternative known as the “viscose process.”^[9] The viscose process wasn’t explosive and held up well against moisture, and the British company Courtaulds began commercial production using it starting in 1905.^[9] So while Chardonnet’s invention reached the world first, the method that endures widely today is the safer viscose process. This case makes clear that being first to invent something doesn’t guarantee becoming the standard. This regenerated fiber, long known as “artificial silk,” finally received the new name “rayon” in 1924 — a decision made by the industry to avoid confusion with real silk.^[7]

Nylon and Polyester — Manufacturing the Material Itself, from Scratch

If rayon reprocessed a material that already existed in nature, the next step was to assemble, from scratch, a material that didn’t exist in nature at all. Nylon represents this shift. In February 1935, Wallace Carothers and his research team at DuPont in the United States combined two chemicals, hexamethylenediamine and adipic acid, to create an entirely new substance for the first time: a polyamide. On the first day nylon stockings went on sale in 1940, four million pairs sold out. The invention of nylon and the social frenzy it set off have already been covered in detail in an article on the origin of plastic, so this article won’t repeat that ground.

What deserves attention here instead is what happened after nylon — the transformation of the entire textile industry. Nylon, and the polyester that followed it, didn’t just lower the price of clothing. They changed how people related to clothes altogether. Garments made from natural fiber needed careful upkeep and frequent mending, but synthetic-fiber clothing resisted wrinkles, dried quickly, and held up well against wear. Clothing shifted from something people kept for years and carefully maintained, into something closer to a disposable good — cheap to buy and easy to swap out.

Polyester wasn’t invented by Carothers, but by two British chemists, John Rex Whinfield and James Dickson. Working at the Calico Printers’ Association’s research laboratory in Accrington, Lancashire, the two combined terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol in 1941 to create a new polymer — a substance made of long, chain-like molecules.^[10] Because the invention was considered militarily sensitive during wartime, it was kept secret, and the patent wasn’t published until 1946.^[10] The material was named “Terylene,” and Britain’s ICI took charge of commercial production. That same year, DuPont in the United States bought the rights from ICI and began producing it under the name “Dacron,” with both companies’ products reaching the market side by side in 1951.^[10]

Nylon and polyester are fundamentally different creations from rayon. Rayon simply reshaped cellulose already obtained from wood without changing its underlying chemistry, whereas nylon and polyester link small molecules derived from petroleum through chemical reactions to build, entirely from scratch, a new polymer that never existed in nature before. This marked a shift from merely reprocessing a material to inventing the material itself.

The Moment Polyester Overtook Cotton

Once created, polyester rapidly expanded its production over the following decades. According to a joint survey by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Cotton Advisory Committee, global synthetic fiber consumption reached 35.8 million tons in 2009 alone, already well ahead of cotton consumption at 23.3 million tons.^[11]

Exactly which year polyester first overtook cotton varies slightly depending on which source you consult. Most sources roughly agree it happened sometime in the early 2000s, but it’s difficult to pin down a single, precise year. Still, taken together, the production and consumption figures make one thing clear: by the late 2000s at the latest, polyester had unmistakably overtaken cotton. And that gap has continued to widen ever since. According to a 2025 survey by the textile industry group Textile Exchange, global fiber production in 2024 totaled roughly 132 million tons, of which about 78 million tons — 59 percent — was polyester. Cotton, by comparison, accounted for just 24.5 million tons, or 19 percent of the total.^[12]

The numbers tell an unambiguous story. Today, more of the fabric people wear comes from a chemical plant than from a field or an animal. As Part 1 discussed, humanity was once bound by a biological ceiling on how much wool, cotton, and silk nature could provide. That ceiling no longer exists. As long as there’s petroleum, there’s effectively no limit to how much more thread can be produced.

Thread That Flows from the Washing Machine to the Sea

But this near-limitless production capacity came with a cost no one anticipated. In 2011, a team led by Mark Browne at the University of Plymouth in the UK collected and analyzed the drainage water from household washing machines. They found that a single wash of one synthetic-fiber garment released more than 1,900 microscopic fiber fragments into the water.^[13] When the team examined effluent discharged from sewage treatment plants, they found the microplastics inside it were made up of 67 percent polyester, 17 percent acrylic, and 16 percent nylon-type fibers.^[13] The proportions of fiber types found in sediment on beaches around the world closely matched the proportions found in wastewater discharge from textile washing.^[13]

A 2017 report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature makes the scale of this problem even clearer. According to the report, 15 to 31 percent of the plastic that enters the ocean each year arrives as “primary microplastics” — plastic that begins its life as small pellets or fibers rather than breaking down from larger debris — and roughly 35 percent of that comes from fibers shed while washing synthetic-fiber clothing.^[14] In Asia in particular, washing clothes was identified as the single largest source of microplastics, ahead of any other cause.^[14]

One reason synthetic fibers became so popular was their durability — they simply didn’t wear out. But that same durability means the fiber fragments that escape the washing machine don’t break down easily in nature either, accumulating instead in rivers, oceans, and sediment. Thread made to last has ended up lasting longest in places no one ever intended.

Different Sources, Not a Different Story

Part 1 ended with the observation that nature never handed humans a finished product. Sheep never had soft wool to begin with — humans created it through thousands of years of breeding. Cotton had to be independently recognized and domesticated by different peoples on opposite sides of the planet. That article closed with a question: once humans hit the biological limits of nature, what did they do next?

Part 2 has offered the answer. Humans didn’t stop at drawing wool the sheep’s body never had — they went on to draw, out of crude oil, molecules that nature never had either. The methods look completely different. One was a slow selection process spanning hundreds of generations; the other, a synthesis completed in a matter of hours inside a chemical reactor. But underneath, both are doing the same thing: taking something nature didn’t offer as-is, and manufacturing it into the form humans wanted. Only the source of the material changed, from a sheep’s body to crude oil — the underlying impulse driving it is not new in the least.

This time, though, the outcome of that impulse has slipped beyond human control. Wool produced through breeding stayed within the sheep’s body, and cotton fields stayed within national borders. But the polyester fibers that escape a washing machine flow through sewers into rivers, from rivers into the ocean, and from the ocean back into fish, into salt, and into human bodies. Humans succeeded in obtaining thread that nature never gave them. They still don’t fully know how far that thread will travel.

Previous: Part 1: From Natural Materials to Fiber