ABSTRACT
From 1780 to the mid 1840s the textile mill played a key role in stimulating the structural use of cast iron, the seminal building material of the nineteenth century. Whilst other fields contributed by progressively more adventurous
use of the new material, nowhere else was iron as generally applied or as systematically investigated. After the third decade of the century the railway made a greater impact, at first relying heavily on the accumulated experience of the textile mill builders but increasingly responsible for independent advances. By the 1860s textile mill design was still evolving but the scale of the challenge it presented was less than that of the railway from which it increasingly received technology.
