INDUSTRIES 



Kennedy wrote in his paper on The Rise and 

 Progress of the Cotton Trade, read to the 

 Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society : 



It is found .... that one person cannot attend 

 upon more than two power-looms and it is still 

 problematical whether this saving of labour counter- 

 balances the expense of power and machinery, and 

 the disadvantages of being obliged to keep an 

 establishment of power-looms constantly at work. 



Even in 1 834 in the whole of Bolton there were 

 only 733 power-weavers, running 1,466 power- 

 looms, while in the same town 7,000 to 8,000 

 hand-loom weavers plied their craft and succeeded 

 in making a not unsatisfactory living as things 

 were then.'' The first power-looms were driven 

 by steam ; hence they were known generally as 

 steam-looms. One reason for the slow triumph 

 of power-weaving was the hatred of factory life 

 by the operatives, who had acquired their habits 

 under the domestic system. Yet it must be 

 remembered that some factories existed before 

 power-weaving was introduced : thus Butter- 

 worth writes of Oldham : '^ 



In the latter part of the last and the beginning of 

 the present century a large number of weavers 

 possessed spacious loom shops, where they not only 

 employed many journey-men weavers, but a consider- 

 able proportion of apprentice children. 



The proportion of hand-loom weavers so em- 

 ployed, however, was not high ; if anything it 

 would have increased as time went on, but the 

 commissioners on hand-loom weavers, who 

 reported in 1 84 1, declared that the number so 

 employed was small. 



This is not the place to describe in detail the 

 machinery used in the cotton industry, but the 

 development of this industry in Lancashire cannot 

 be imderstood apart from the general history of 

 the mechanical inventions relating to it. We 

 must now notice those in spinning. The chief 

 inventors were Paul and Wyatt, Hargreaves, and 

 Crompton. The two latter were Lancashire 

 men, as John Kay had been, but Paul was of 

 foreign extraction, and Wyatt was born near 

 Lichfield, and the work of the two latter was 

 associated with Birmingham, Northampton, and 

 Leominster. It was Paul and Wyatt who gave 

 us the principle of spinning by rollers." The 



" Pari. Rep. 1 834, x ; evidence, especially Q. 5627, 

 5058, 5728-30. 



^Hist. of Oldham. 



''There has been a controversy over this point, 

 Arkwright, Wyatt, Paul, and Thomas Highs of 

 Leigh having severally had the discovery accredited 

 to them. The truth probably is that the invention, 

 as a working machine, resulted from the collaboration 

 of Wyatt and Paul, and that each of them had some 

 share in it. It is impossible to say to which belongs 

 the most credit. Robert Cole in his paper to the 



385 



patent was taken out in 1738, but nothing was 

 made of the plan until Arkwright, the ex-barber 

 of Kirkham, Preston, and Bolton, improved it in 

 1769.'* He obtained a patent in the same year, 

 and in 1775 he also patented machinery for 

 carding, drawing, and roving machinery. Nine 

 actions were instituted by Arkwright in 1781 

 against infringements of the second patent, and 

 an association of Lancashire spinners was forme 1 

 to defend them. As a result of the one that 

 came to trial the patent was set aside on the 

 ground of obscurity in the specifications. This 

 decision was upheld in 1785 when Arkwright 

 made a second attempt. The first patent ran 

 out in 1783. After the first trial mentioned 

 above Arkwright drew up a petition to Parlia- 

 ment (which was never presented) in which he 

 asked for both patents to be continued to him 

 for the unexpired period of the second, that was 

 until 1789. Arkwright and his partners (at that 

 time Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt) began 

 work at Nottingham ; in 1771 they started the 

 mill at Cromford. In his ' Case ' (i.e. his peti- 

 tion above mentioned) Arkwright stated that he 



sold to numbers of adventurers residing in the different 

 counties of Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Worcester, 

 Stafford, York, Hertford, and Lancashire many of his 

 patent machines. Upon a moderate computation 

 the money expended in consequence of such grants 

 (before 1782) amounted to at least j^6o,ooo. Mr. Ark- 

 wright and his partners also expended in large buildings 

 in Derbyshire and elsewhere upwards of ^^3 0,000, and 

 Mr. Arkwright also erected a very large and extensive 

 building in Manchester at the expense of upwards of 

 ^4,000. 



Thus 



a business was formed, which already (he calculated) 

 employed upwards of five thousand persons, and a 

 capital on the whole of not less than ^^200,000.°' 



Water-power was so important an economy 

 in the case of spinning by rollers, the 

 machinery being heavy, that the sites of the 

 factories for this spinning were almost imme- 

 diately confined to the banks of streams (hence 

 the term water-frames), though Arkwright in his 

 specification spoke only of the power of horses, 

 which was used at his first mill at Nottingham, 

 but not at his second mill at Cromford in Derby- 

 shire. It is interesting to read the following 



British Association in 1858 (reprinted as an appendix 

 to the first edition of French's Life of Crompton) urges 

 the claims of Paul, but Paul Mantoux in his La Revolu- 

 tion Industrielle au xviii" Sikle, after studying the 

 Wyatt MSS., inclines to assign to Wyatt the leading 

 position. Arkwright was assisted in making his 

 machine by Kay, a clock-maker of Warrington. 

 Kay is said to have told him of an invention by 

 Highs. 



°* Arkwright died in 1792. 



"Case, quoted from Baines, op. cit. 183. 



49 



