Chapter 160

The cotton textile technology of the Ming Dynasty was actually very mature. From ginning, stretching cotton, spinning, to weaving, and dyeing after weaving, there are advanced tools and processes, which are no worse than those of the contemporaneous West.

As long as a person is self-pedaling, self-shaking, self-feeding, ten pounds of seed cotton can be ginned a day, and three catties of lint can be produced. The slingshot is hung at the top of the curved bamboo pole tied to the column, which can save the effort of lifting the bow from time to time, and the operation is extremely convenient.

For spinning, there is a pedal spinning wheel improved by Huang Daopo, which can spin four or even five spindles of cotton yarn at the same time. As for weaving, the technology is more advanced, and the weaving and interweaving technology is very mature, with various varieties of three, five, and seven weavers, and can also blend cotton, linen, and silk to make all kinds of cloth.

If you build a textile factory, you can make use of these mature technologies to make textile machinery, hire workers, spin and weave cloth. With the royal background as the background, it was very easy to set up such a textile factory.

However, these textile technologies are all done manually, which requires too many workers, laborious, time-consuming, and costly.

What Zhu Youzhen wants to do is to invent new technologies to replace manpower and greatly improve production efficiency, so that he can compete with the cotton cloth in Jiangnan and sell a large number of cotton cloth overseas, so as to make a lot of money!

Zhu Youzhen has seen steam trains, steam ships, and even more powerful electric machinery, but Zhu Youzhen can't understand it at all, he doesn't know what's going on, and he can't describe many things if he wants to describe them.

Maybe you can write some of the pictures that Soul Tour has seen, so that you can guide the geniuses of the Academy of Sciences to study in that direction, maybe then the Ming Dynasty can invent things like the steam engine and take the lead in triggering a technological revolution. But if you want to successfully invent it, you don't know how many years it will take, and Zhu Youzhen can't wait at all!

But you can use water power! There was a water-powered spinning wheel in the pre-Song Dynasty, but it was lost during the Yuan Rebellion, so why couldn't it be remade to replace manpower? The Academy of Sciences has the best technical talents of this era, and it is completely possible to design a set of textile machinery that can use water power!

Under Zhu Youzhen's heavy reward and future equity incentives, Song Yingxing, Wang Zheng, Deng Yuhan, Tang Ruowang and others began to study day and night. Xu Guangqi even forgot to attend the cabinet meeting, which caused Huang Liji, Shi Fenglai and other scholars to be very dissatisfied, and the imperial history impeached Xu Guangqi for his plaything!

They first had craftsmen make the current textile machinery, and then they began to study how to use water power to make the machines run automatically. These people were extremely smart, and soon invented the water-powered spinning machine, the water-powered churning car, and the water-powered loom, but the efficiency of weaving still did not improve much.

"I understand that the original pedal spinning wheel can spin four spindles at the same time, and the water-powered spinning machine we designed is still four spindles, so it is not possible, it should be redesigned to design a spinning machine that can spin at least eight spindles or even more." Song Yingxing said.

"There are also water-powered looms, which are no different than they used to be. The woven cloth is too narrow, and we should design a loom for weaving wide cloth. And when weaving, the shuttle has to be thrown back and forth by the worker, the speed is slow, and the worker is easily tired. Deng Yuhan also said.

Deng Yuhan knew how to do mechanics, but he couldn't make some delicate things, so he sent people to Macau and hired a few watchmakers from Europa.

Finally, after more than half a year, a Swiss watchmaker named White made the "shuttle", which was placed in a special trough and driven by a special rope, and the weaver pulled the rope to fly back and forth over the shuttle. In terms of efficiency, compared with the original hand-thrown shuttle method, the efficiency is doubled, and the cloth surface is half wider than the original.

For spinning machines, Wang Zheng provided an idea of placing the original horizontal spindles vertically, so that one spinning wheel could drive more spindles. Wang Zheng and Deng Yuhan collaborated to design a new textile machine based on this idea, which can use one spinning wheel to drive eight vertical spindles, doubling the efficiency. Later, it was improved to use one spinning wheel to drive 32 spindles, and the efficiency was further improved.

After the initial invention of the water-powered spinning loom, Zhu Youzhen ordered the establishment of a textile factory. At first, it was planned to build a factory by the Yongding River outside Beijing, and later Xu Guangqi proposed that the factory could be set up in Tianjin.

The reason is that Tianjin guards the canal, and the cotton purchased from all over Shandong and Hebei can be transported to Tianjin through the canal, and the cotton cloth produced can also be transported to other places or even overseas through the waterway. If the factory is located in Beijing, the transportation needs to go through the canal to Tongzhou first, and then transfer from Tongzhou by land, which is very troublesome.

Moreover, to the east of the Tianjin Acropolis, there is a large amount of saline-alkali land near the seaside, the yield of crops planted in these places is very low, many of them are wasteland, the cost of purchasing land is very low, and it can even be directly expropriated in the name of the royal family, after all, the future workshop will be bigger and bigger, and a lot of land is needed.

Zhu Youzhen followed Xu Guangqi's advice and decided to build a factory in Tianjin. After consideration, Song Yingxing was appointed as the first prime minister of the Royal Cotton Textile Factory, responsible for the preparation of the factory.

In the first year of Chongzhen, Song Yingxing tried to fail again, completely despaired of the imperial examination, and joined the Royal Academy of Sciences under the recommendation of Xu Guangqi to engage in the research work that he was most interested in. The establishment of a hydro-textile factory requires the construction of too many hydro-powered machinery, and there must be such a person in charge. In order to motivate Song Yingxing, Zhu Youzhen gave him an official position to be edicted in the Hanlin Academy, although he only had nine grades, he was a noble Hanlin official, and he did not have to work in the Hanlin Academy.

Of course, Song Yingxing is only in charge of technology, and in terms of specific management, a lecturer named Tian Hua was transferred from the business department of the Academy of Sciences to serve as the chief treasurer. Tian Hua was originally the shopkeeper of the eunuch party's commercial bank, the eunuch party fell, the assets were confiscated, Tian Hua was almost arrested in the Jinyiwei prison, the Academy of Sciences was established, and he was recruited to the Academy of Sciences as a lecturer to teach business management operations to business students.

After Tian Hua took office, the first thing he did was to visit the gentry in Shandong and finalize the cotton purchase contract in the name of the imperial merchants. The price he gave was not low, even slightly higher than the market price, and the amount he asked for was large, so the gentry in Shandong were naturally willing to cooperate with him.

Of course, that's all for later. Pull the time forward, just when everyone in the Academy of Sciences was still researching hydraulic textile machinery, the newly established Dagu water division, Zhou Yuji and Zheng Zhilong, received a task.