Alexander Mackendrick's The Man in the White Suit (1951) is my favorite of the 4 Ealing comedies that we've seen (Mackendrick also directed Sweet Smell of Success, which I saw pre-blog, and The Ladykillers, which I found awfully slow). It was nice to see Joan Greenwood, although I preferred her in Kind Hearts and Coronets. I was also interested in a scene near the beginning which showed a factory's machinery being run off shafts running overhead instead of by electric motors. It was Paul David, in "The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox" American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings (May 1990), who pointed out that it took decades for the electric motor to be integrated into industrial production, but I hadn't realized it was so late. The movie was also interesting because it's about a miraculous new textile that both the industrialists and the workers feared would ruin them. I'd just read JANE TANNER's A Bet on Textiles, Despite the Doomsayers:

...the domestic textile industry's demise may be exaggerated. Certainly, Asian and Latin American suppliers of clothing have trounced domestic apparel makers in all but a few niches. On the other hand, many American textile makers, with their technologically sophisticated factories, innovative fabrics and robust operations outside of garments, have staying power....

Nano-Tex, a company in Emeryville, Calif...has developed a fabric finish that repels water and stains. Burlington sells the process to Eddie Bauer, Lands' End, Levi Strauss and the Gap, among others. Simmons applies the finish to children's bedding.

Burlington expects to take Nano-Tex public before long, said Rene� DeLack Hultin, who is in charge of business development at Nano-Tex.

Other so-called smart fabrics are heading for the market. Among them, according to the trade journal Textile News, are car seats to wake up drowsy drivers, bed sheets that monitor health, and cold-weather vests with emergency beacons that trigger if a wearer is suffering from exposure.

Engineered fibers are widely used in products like tires, fiber optic cable and human artery reinforcements. Only a third of textile products made in the United States are for clothing. "The stealth bomber is a textile product," said Mr. Godfrey of North Carolina State. "It's made out of carbon fiber."

So there is such a thing as progress.

Update

In the movie, the protagonist's landlady complains to him that scientists should leave well enough alone, that if clothing never gets dirty, she'll lose a source of income. But then keeping clean isn't necessarily something that people have always done. In a review of Arwen P. Mohun's Steam Laundries, the Economist says,

Keeping clean was a novel idea two centuries ago. The demand for laundry grew out of the discovery, in the 19th century, of links between dirt and disease, and from the emergence of clean clothes as a sign of social superiority.

In his Victorian translation of China: James Legge's Oriental pilgrimage, Girardot comments on Legge's criticism of Chinese filth, suggesting cleanliness was a Victorian thing, and not one engaged in by the masses. He sounds like he's trying to highlight Legge's Orientalism, but then later commenting on Legge's complaints about the filthy temples on Taishan, lets slip that they were still filthy when he himself visited a century later.

I alluded to this Economist review earlier; it also says,

...people in the West, like 19th-century missionaries, are tempted to impose their cultural assumptions on other countries, convinced that West is best.

Sorry, but I don't buy it. Some things, like cleanliness, are better. The trouble is, we don't always know which ones are better and which ones our prejudices favor.