In 1907, the first national census of British manufacturing confirmed textilemachine making as the largest single engineering branch. The nation's textile engineers presented ‘an overwhelmingly dominant force in world trade’, exporting 45 per cent of what they made. On the eve of the Great War, the industry employed 40,000, almost all of these men or apprentices. The United States was alone in the world in not relying upon Britain for most of its machines. Even so, just one Yorkshire town, Keighley, monopolized the American market in worsted machinery.

Machine-making holds a special place within the narrative of industrialization. The eighteenth century's breakthrough textile machines have become familiar because they are held to symbolize that great industrial and social upheaval. But the industry that produced these and later marvels, laying the foundations of mechanical engineering as we know it, lingers in the shadows. A century before its dominance was officially established in 1907, textile engineering was still a work in progress, in the process of configuring itself into a standalone trade. The industry's rudiments were worked out over the course of half a century, from perhaps 1770, in the textile districts of northern England. Here, individuals of limited education, with few financial resources and in general possessing no more than rough and ready skills, embarked upon an extraordinary creative endeavour that (it is no exaggeration to say) shaped today's world.

How could such achievement emerge from apparently unpromising beginnings? Here was an artisan trade picking up the sharp edge of technology, catching a wave of innovation, working out techniques and creating tools, cultivating a skilled labour force, and raising a generation capable of developing a complex new institutional framework. Textile engineering was more than just another new manufacturing industry: it was also the source of innovation, its role to develop and supply new kinds of technology to apparently eager users in the textile industry. An intriguing dynamic was at work. Demand could be generated through innovation – an efficient machine launched upon the textile industry was likely to find a market. Minds were open to change, and as the process of mechanizing textiles accelerated from the mid- to lateeighteenth century, the possibilities must have excited.