At the time of the American Revolution, every part of the production process for creating textiles was done by hand. People, in many cases slaves, planted the cotton, cultivated the cotton by hoeing it, and then picked the cotton one boll at a time. People pulled the seeds out of the cotton, spun the cotton on manual spinning wheels, and wove the colton into cloth on hand looms. Then people cut and sewed the fabric by hand. All of that began to change in America in the late 1700s. The first successful cotton mill opened in 1790 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. At this site, the Industrial Revolution in the United States began. If you have ever watched a human being spinning cotton into thread on an old-fashioned foot-operated spinning wheel, you know that it is a slow, tedious process. It starts with carding, which aligns the cotton fibers. Then the spinning wheel twists the fibers together to form thread or yarn. To make the textile industry possible, this whole spinning process needed to become mechanized. The Pawtucket cotton mill handled the process of carding and spinning with machines. The important machine was the spinning frame, which performed the actual act of spinning. But for this machine to work efficiently, it needed rovings, which were long, slightly twisted strands of fibers about the size of a fat pencil. To form the rovings, a series of machines carded the fibers, made them into slivers, combined the slivers, and sent them to a drawing machine. The basic idea was to create a consistent product rugged enough to feed continuously into the spinning frame without the rovings coming apart or jamming As you might imagine, this whole mechanization idea created a field day for inventors and mechanical engineers. In the same way that the Wright brothers demonstrated a working airplane and then aviation exploded, this first example of mechanization started a revolution in textiles. >Slates Mill, was the first water-powered cotton-spinning mill in America.