AMERICAN INDUSTRIES SINCE COLUMBUS. 293 



bobbins, and driving the latter by worsted bands. It is worth 

 noting that James Watt obtained his first patent on the steam- 

 engine in this same memorable year 1769. Thus the indispensable 

 auxiliary of manufacturing evolution the power to drive the ma- 

 chines that were to supersede the hands had a contemporaneous 

 birth. Long prior to the application of steam-power other agen- 

 cies than human strength were utilized to drive these primitive 

 machines. We read of asses harnessed to them, and Arkwright 

 drove his first spinning machines with the aid of a bull. The 

 English manufacturers were never able to utilize water-power for 

 driving their machinery to the extent that it was applied in the 

 earlier manufactures of the United States. The streams of New 

 England were long the only motive power of her machinery ; and 

 their value to-day, in the various processes of the woolen manu- 

 facture, is beyond calculation. 



Paul and Wyatt taught the world how to spin a hundred or 

 more threads at one operation ; but years elapsed after these early 

 inventions before they came into general use. Paul worked his 

 own machines for many years ; but when he died they were broken 

 up and sold, and the world continued to spin on the foot-wheel. 

 The tardy realization of the value of these inventions was due 

 primarily to the opposition of the hand operatives to the intro- 

 duction of anything in the nature of improved machinery. The 

 guilds were strong, and determined in their refusal to operate or 

 tolerate new devices for dispensing with hand labor. Poor John 

 Kay, after inventing his fly-shuttle, was compelled to close his 

 mill at Leeds by the riotous hostility of the hand-weavers. Learn- 

 ing that he was also engaged in devising machinery for spinning, 

 a mob broke into his house, destroyed everything it contained, 

 and would have killed the inventor himself had not friends smug- 

 gled him away in a wool-sheet. We need not be surprised at the 

 blind brutality of these ignorant workingmen. They looked upon 

 the inventor as an enemy, planning to take the bread from their 

 mouths. But what shall we say of the manufacturers who stole 

 the patents of Kay, without recognition of the service his genius 

 had done them ? And what shall we say of the Government which 

 permitted this man, in his old age, without recompense for inven- 

 tions which added untold millions to the wealth of his country, to 

 seek refuge from persecution in France, there to die in abject 

 penury ? 



It needed a man of the determination of Richard Arkwright 

 to force the world to appreciate the opportunity which these in- 

 ventions opened before it. In 1775 Arkwright obtained a patent, 

 the specifications of which contained the drawing rollers patented 

 by Lewis Paul in 1738 ; the roving-can used by Benjamin Buller 

 in 1759 ; the main cylinder and the finishing cylinder, both used 



