INGENUITY AND LUXURY 



position. Yet the treatment accorded these inventors 

 by fellow Englishmen makes anything but creditable 

 history. Official England, to be sure, stands in a bet- 

 ter light in these matters; and the English Government, 

 as is usual in such cases, did well by the gifted inven- 

 tors. But little can be said of the English workingmen 

 who mobbed John Kay for inventing the flying-shuttle 

 which revolutionized weaving; drove out of the country 

 James Hargreaves because he had invented his spin- 

 ning-jenny with which one man could perform the work 

 of many, and destroyed the factories of Sir Richard 

 Arkwright, the inventor of the spinning-frame. When 

 we reflect that the inventions of Kay, Hargreaves, and 

 Arkwright eventually gave England her exalted posi- 

 tion in the manufacturing world, the action of the 

 ignorant mobs of workmen, sometimes observed, but 

 not interfered with, by officials, seems the more 

 inexcusable. 



In 1858, Mr. Cole, in a paper read before the British 

 Association, attempted to show that the first inventor 

 of a spinning-machine was one Lewis Paul, of Bir- 

 mingham, who made such an invention in 1738. In 

 this paper Mr. Cole brought some striking evidence 

 in support of his belief that Paul's invention acted by 

 means of rollers on something the same principle as 

 Arkwright's spinning-frame, invented thirty years 

 later. 



There is no question, however, that the machine 

 which came to be known as the spinning-jenny was the 

 invention of James Hargreaves and of him alone; 

 and this machine must be credited with being the first 



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