59 50 SAMUEL CROMPTON-INVENTION OF THE MULE. [1760-1783. unrefined, without originality in his ideas, but a most skilful appropriator. The bold man died worth half a million sterling, for he had self-confidence, tact, and knowledge of human character. The timid man was easily disheartened, shrinking from speculation, and easily deceived. He would have. lived a poor weaver to the end of his days, unable, as he said of himself, "to contend with men of the world," had not Parliament, in 1812, granted him a paltry compensation of 50007. for the great invention which he "gave up to the country," as he said, but which he was really cheated into giving up by a host of selfish manufacturers, who made fortunes out of his simple trust. Crompton was spinning with Hargreaves' jenny, four or five years after Arkwright had produced harder and finer yarn by his water-frame than the jenny could produce, whatever amount it had added to the quantity spun. Crompton saw what was wanting. With a few common tools, and a claspknife, he worked for five years before he perfected what was originally called the Hall-in-the-Wood wheel. "The great and important invention of Crompton was his spindle-carriage, and the principle of the thread having no strain upon it until it was completed. The carriage with the spindles could, by the movement of the hand and knee, recede just as the rollers delivered out the elongated thread in a soft state, so that it would allow of a considerable stretch before the thread had to encounter the stress of winding on the spindle."* This was "the corner-stone of the merits of his invention," which Crompton connected with the system of rollers, and thus added the second great and permanent principle of the machinery for cotton-spinning. In 1779, when this machine was completed by the young weaver, the riots broke out by which Arkwright's mill at Chorley was destroyed. From the solitary room where Crompton had been so long working in secret, he heard the shouts of a mob who were breaking to pieces a carding-engine in the adjoining hamlet of Folds. He was prepared for such an emergency. He had cut an opening in the ceiling of his room to the loft above, which aperture he had fitted with a trap-door. He hastily took his machine to pieces, and hoisted the parts into the dark hole where they were concealed for many weeks. The riots were put down, and tranquillity was restored; but not till after the jennies had been destroyed for miles round Bolton. Whilst working upon his invention Crompton had married. He took to wife a young woman of good family and education, but who, being left an orphan in reduced circumstances, maintained herself by spinning. The home of the young people was in a cottage attached to the Hall-in-the-Wood; and in a room of the old mansion they secretly worked on the now-perfected mule. No yarn comparable for fineness and firmness had ever been produced as that which Crompton carried to the Bolton market, obtaining a proportional price. People began to think that there was some mystery. Fingers could not produce such yarn; nor could the jenny. Manufacturers gathered round, some to buy, others to endeavour to penetrate the secret. They in vain tried to obtain admission to the old house. They climbed up to the windows to look in. The bewildered man soon saw that it would be impossible to keep his secret. In a manuscript which he left behind him, he says, of this anxious "Memoir of Crompton," by John Kennedy; quoted in Mr. French's "Life. 1760-1783.] RUSH TO ENGAGE IN COTTON-SPINNING. 51 period, "during this time I married, and commenced spinner altogether. But a few months reduced me to the cruel necessity either of destroying my machine altogether, or giving it up to the public. To destroy it I could not think of; to give up that for which I had laboured so long was cruel. I had no patent, nor the means of purchasing one. In preference to destroying it, I gave it to the public." Manufacturers had come about him with tempting promises, and had persuaded him to give up his secret, upon the condition, recited in a formal document, of subscribing sums to be affixed to the name of each "as a reward for his improvement in spinning." The whole sum they subscribed was 677. 68. 6d. The subscription paper is in existence. "The list is curiously interesting as containing among the half-guinea subscribers the names of many Bolton firms now of great wealth and eminence as mule spinners, whose colossal fortunes may be said to have been based upon this singularly small investment." * In five years Crompton's "mule " was the machine chiefly employed for fine spinning, not only round Bolton, but in the manufacturing districts of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The common piracies of Arkwright's water-frame, its more extensive use when the patent expired in 1781, and the general appropriation of Crompton's mule, very soon changed the neighbourhood of which Manchester was the centre, from a country of small farmers into a country of small manufacturers. Houses on the banks of streams whose currents would drive a wheel and shaft were greedily seized upon. Sheds were run up in similar situations. The clank of wheels and the buzz of spindles were heard in once solitary places upon the branches of the Irwell. The smaller streams that French. "Life of Samuel Crompton," p. 72, from which interesting volume we derive the facts thus briefly related by us. 52 RAPID INCREASE OF LANCASHIRE TOWNS. [1760-1783 flowed from the barren hills into secluded valleys, might be apostrophized in the lines of Ebenezer Elliott: "Beautiful rivers of the desert! ye Bring food for labour from the foodless waste." Crompton's mules, worked by hand, "were erected in garrets or lofts; and many a dilapidated barn or cow-house was patched up in the walls, repaired in the roof, and provided with windows, to serve as lodging room for the new muslin wheels." * Amidst this hurried system of expedients to obtain the gains of cotton-spinning, these small factories were supplied with the labour of children by a mode which excited the indignation of all rightthinking persons. Children of very tender age, collected from the London workhouses, and other abodes of the friendless, were transported to Manchester and the neighbourhood as apprentices. These were often worked through the whole night; had no regard paid to their cleanliness; and received no instruction. Aikin, who records these grievances, adds that in many factories, remedies had been adopted. It was forty years before the Legislature effectually interfered to protect factory children. A greater change than that produced by the water-frame and the mule was impending. The period was quickly approaching when the tall stalk would start up in the bye-streets of quiet towns, and gather around its clouds of smoke a new population. Of Bolton, whose inhabitants had more than doubled from 1783 to 1789, it is recorded that "the want of water in this district is made up by the ingenious invention of the machines called mules." The want of water would in a few years be made up by a far more manageable power. Bury had its "cotton manufacture, originally brought from Bolton," with "factories erected upon the rivers and many brooks within the parish." Its population had increased in a larger propor tion than that of Bolton; but the increase would be far more rapid when the rivers and brooks were no longer essential for the movement of rollers and spindles. In 1794 some small steam-engines, made by Mr. Sherrard, a very ingenious and able engineer, had begun in Manchester to be "used in cottonmills, and for every purpose of the water-wheel, where a stream is not to be got." This local manufacture of steam-engines was beginning to encounter a formidable rivalry: "Some few are also erected in this neigh bourhood by Messrs. Bolton and Watts, of Birmingham, who have far excelled all others in their improvement of the steam-engine."§ In this stage of his career, the name of the Glasgow mechanic whose statue is in Westminster Abbey, appears not to have been sufficiently known to be spelt correctly by a writer of note. Dr. Aikin probably knew little of the achievements of the man who, "directing the force of an original genius, early exercised in philosophic research, to the improvement of the steam-engine, enlarged the resources of his country, increased the power of man, and rose to an eminent place amongst the illustrious followers of science and the real benefactors of the world." The rotatory steam-engine of Watt was first applied to the Aikir, p. 262. *French, p. 76. Lord Brougham's Epitaph on Watt. § Ibid., p. 177. * 1760-1783.] DR. CARTWRIGHT. 53 textile manufactures of Lancashire in 1787, when one was erected at Warrington. It had been applied in Nottinghamshire in 1785. In 1856, according to the Report of the Factory Commissioners, the steamengines employed in 5000 factories represented 161,000 horse-power, giving motion to the astounding number of 33,000,000 spindles. It is calculated in the Statistical Account of the Population of 1851, that in Great Britain "more than a million young women are spinsters "the still recognized name for unmarried women. To produce the same amount of yarn spun in the old domestic way, would probably require not only all the spinsters of our own country, and all the spinsters of our great Indian empire, where the Hindoo girl still produces the finest yarn from her primitive wheel, but all the spinsters of the habitable globe. The rate at which the spindles of a cotton-mill move so far exceeds the rate of the spinning-wheel, that no smaller number, we may presume, could convert a thousand million pounds of raw cotton into yarn in one year, as is now done in Great Britain. But if the rate of speed were equal, and the object could be effected by the daily movement for ten hours of thirty-three millions of spindles, it would be necessary that every British spinster should have the power of giving activity to thirty-three wheels with one spindle each; or that, having the advantage of the spinningjenny with eight spindles, she should have the power of working four jennies at one and the same time. The contrast between the old spinning-wheel and the spinning-mill cannot be put in a stronger point of view. Inventions connected with the more rapid processes of spinning were not long behind the jenny and the water-frame. Such was the cylindrical cardingengine. The natural progression of machinery in spinning, from the simplest domestic wheel to the complex mule, would, we may presume, have suggested that the same advance would be applicable to weaving; that as the fly-shuttle bad doubled the rate at which a hand-weaver could work, so some invention might double, or even supersede, the still tardy process of the hand-weaver. Such an invention did come, though in a very rude and imperfect state. Edmund Cartwright, a clergyman, bred at University College, Oxford-a 54 DR. CARTWRIGHT'S POWER-LOOM. [1760-1783. poet and a critic-was at Matlock in 1784, when, in a mixed company in which were some persons from Manchester, the talk was about cotton-how the want of hands to weave would operate against the spinning-mills. Cartwright knew nothing of machines or manufactures; he had never even seen a weaver at work; but he said that if it came to a want of hands, Arkwright must invent a weaving-mill. The Manchester men maintained that such a notion was impracticable. Cartwright went home, and, turning his thoughts from weaving articles for the "Monthly Review," laboured assiduously to produce a loom that would weave cloth without hands to throw the shuttle. His children remembered him as walking about as if in deep meditation, occasionally throwing his arms from side to side, and they were told that their father was thinking of the action of the shuttle.* He completed his machine, which, he says, required the strength of two powerful men to work at a slow rate, and whose springs were strong enough to have thrown a Congreve rocket. He took out a patent. Cartwright's power-loom, improved by the inventor by incessant exercises of ingenuity, came very slowly into use. A mill, the first erected for their employment on a large scale, was wilfully set on fire, and five hundred of the power looms were destroyed. The patent expired, having been to the inventor a constant source of loss and anxiety. The invention, great as its results have been, was scarcely recognized in the last century. The power-loom was first brought into profitable use at Glasgow, in 1801. But the ultimate advantage of the principle of automatic weaving was fully acknowledged; and in 1807, upon a memorial of the principal cotton-spinners, Parliament granted Dr. Cartwright 10,000l., for "the good service he had rendered the public by his invention of weaving." There were only 2300 power-looms at work in Great Britain in 1813. In 1833 there were 100,000. At the present time, they are as universal as spinning machines,-very different in their beautiful construction from Cartwright's invention, but the same in principle. The Returns of the Factory Inspectors for 1856 show the employment of 369,205 power-looms, of which 298,847 were for weaving cotton. Such has been the progress of an idea casually impressed upon the The late Mrs. Penrose, whose "History" is known as that of "Mrs. Markham," was a daughter of Dr. Cartwright. |