The museum takes visitors on a journey along the production stages from cotton to yarn.

Spinning at the Textile Mill Cromford in Ratingen (photo courtesy LVR)

Johann Gottfried Brügelmann was an extremely wealthy merchant and textile magnate from Wuppertal at the end of the 18th century. He admired the business acumen and inventive spirit of the English so much that he decided to exploit their know-how to the fullest with the help of industrial espionage.

One glance at his palatial villa is enough to give you an impression of his self-assured economic power. The “metronome of the dawning industrial age” – a clock – hangs prominently over the magnificent stairway of his house and shows: “Time is money”.

Behind the magnificent residence the tall factory rises into the sky, where the huge wooden bucket wheel dominates the ground floor.  The first factory on the European continent came into being in Ratingen, in 1784.

In 1977, almost two hundred years later, the production finally expired. After a long and painstaking period of preparation the LVR Industrial Museum was finally opened in 1996. The original machines do not longer exist. That means, the clattering machines, now in operation in the museum, have at least one thing in common with their predecessors: they are also modelled on English originals – this time completely legally in the service of historical reconstruction.

They are accompanied by sound and video installations, and the explanatory texts paint a multi-facetted portrait of the grinding work in an early industrial spinning mill.