Dr.CARTWRIGHT.
The incident which immediately led to the invention of the power-loom is best related in the words of the inventor himself. “Happening to be at Matlock in the summer of 1784, I fell in company with some gentlemen of Manchester, when the conversation turned on Arkwright’s spinning machinery. One of the company observed, that as soon as Arkwright’s patent expired, so many mills would be erected, and so much cotton spun, that hands never could be found to weave it. To this observation I replied, that Arkwright must then set his wits to work to invent a weaving mill. This brought on a conversation on the subject, in which the Manchester gentlemen unanimously agreed that the thing was impracticable; and in defence of their opinion, they adduced arguments which I certainly was incompetent to answer, or even to comprehend, being totally ignorant of the subject, having never at that time seen a person weave. I controverted however the impracticability of the thing.” Looms driven by power had been constructed before, but they had not been made to answer; and it is probable, from the circumstances of Dr. Cartwright’s life, that he had never heard of them: at all events the idea thus suggested to him did not lie dormant. Before the following April, he had constructed his first power-loom; and he took out his last weaving patent Aug. 1, 1787. Mechanical spinning therefore was the parent of mechanical weaving. Without the former, the latter would have been needless; without the latter, the former would have been incomplete. Every stage of the cotton manufacture, from the cleaning of the raw wool to the formation of a perfect web, may be, and in many establishments is, now carried on under the same roof, and by the moving power of the same engine. The name of Dr. Cartwright should follow that of Sir Richard Arkwright in the list of our national benefactors; though at present it is far less known to the world at large. It was long indeed before Cartwright’s merits were appreciated, and they failed to obtain for him the wealth and distinction which the creation of the factory system secured to Arkwright. The utility of the power-loom is now acknowledged, and its sphere appears to be rapidly enlarging. But it is still limited even in the cotton, and much more in the silk and woollen manufactures; and it is not unreasonable to expect that, as prejudices give way, and fresh refinements render the machine susceptible of more general, not to say universal, application, the art of weaving by mechanism, as formerly of spinning, may give an impulse to our trade, of which we now see the beginning, but cannot conjecture the end.
Engraved by J. Thomson.DR. CARTWRIGHT.From a Picture in the possession of Miss Cartwright.Under the Superintendance of the Society of the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.
Engraved by J. Thomson.DR. CARTWRIGHT.From a Picture in the possession of Miss Cartwright.Under the Superintendance of the Society of the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.
Engraved by J. Thomson.DR. CARTWRIGHT.From a Picture in the possession of Miss Cartwright.Under the Superintendance of the Society of the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street.
Edmund Cartwright was the fourth son of William Cartwright, Esq., of Marnham in Nottinghamshire, a gentleman whose family had been long established in the county, and had suffered considerably in its fortune by adherence to the cause of Charles I. in the civil war. He was born April 24, 1743; and at the school of Wakefield, and at University College, Oxford, received the education usually bestowed upon young men destined for the clerical profession. At an early age he manifested a taste for poetic composition; but though he had printed some short pieces anonymously, his name was not given to the public, until the appearance, in 1770, of ‘Armenia and Elvira,’ a legendary poem, which became so popular that it passed through seven editions in little more than a year. He also published, about the same period, the ‘Prince of Peace,’ and ‘Sonnets to Eminent Men.’ In 1774 he became a contributor to the Monthly Review, in which he continued to write for ten years.
We have not ascertained the date of his taking orders, of his election to a fellowship at Magdalen College, or of his vacating that fellowship by marriage. The degree of D.D. he took in 1806. For some years after his marriage he resided, first on his living at Brampton in Derbyshire, and afterwards at Goadby-Marwood in Leicestershire; where the hours which were not devoted to the duties of his calling were chiefly employed in literary pursuits.
Hitherto Mr. Cartwright’s private life had been that of a retired country clergyman, varied only by his correspondence with literary friends. From his family connexions, and the esteem in which he was held by some who had power to advance him, his prospects in the church were favourable; and he had good reason to believe, that if he had confined himself to the line of life in which he had been educated, and in which he was then advancing, he would have attained a moreample provision in his profession, than it was his lot to acquire by the exercise of his mechanical talent. The existence of such a talent in his own mind had been wholly unknown even to himself, until he was upwards of forty years of age, when the circumstance which has been above narrated called it into action, and caused a change in the whole tenor of his life. In his first attempts he had to contend with the difficulties which usually beset genius without experience. “As I had never before turned my thoughts to anything mechanical, either in theory or practice, nor had even seen a loom at work, or knew anything of its construction, you will readily believe that my first loom was a most rude piece of machinery. The warp was placed perpendicularly; the reed fell with the weight of at least half a hundred weight, and the springs which threw the shuttle were strong enough to have thrown a Congreve rocket. In short, it required the strength of two powerful men to work the machine at a slow rate, and only for a short time.” This, as we have seen, was in 1785: he also applied his talents to effecting the substitution of machinery for manual labour in combing wool, and took out his first patent on this subject in April 1790.
The following anecdotes we quote from the ‘Pursuit of Knowledge,’ vol. ii.; we believe them to rest upon the best authority. “Dr. Cartwright’s children still remember often seeing their father about this time walking to and fro apparently in deep meditation, and occasionally throwing his arms from side to side; on which they used to be told that he was thinking of weaving and throwing the shuttle. From the moment indeed when his attention was first turned to the invention of the power-loom, mechanical contrivance became the grand occupying subject of his thoughts. With that sanguineness of disposition which seems to be almost a necessary part of the character of an inventor, he looked on difficulties, when he met with them in any of his attempts, as only affording his genius occasion for a more distinguished triumph: nor did he allow even repeated failures for a moment to dishearten him. Some time after he had brought his first loom to perfection, a manufacturer, who had called upon him to see it at work, after expressing his admiration of the ingenuity displayed in it, remarked, that wonderful as was Mr. Cartwright’s mechanical skill, there was one thing that would effectually baffle him, namely the weaving of patterns in checks, or in other words, the combining in the same web, of a pattern, or fancy figure, with the crossing colours which constitute the check. Mr. Cartwright made no reply to this observation at the time; but some weeks after, on receiving a second visit from thesame person, he had the pleasure of showing him a piece of muslin of the description mentioned, beautifully executed by machinery. The man is said to have been so much astonished, that he roundly declared his conviction that some agency more than human must have been called in on the occasion.”
The prejudices and opposition which Dr. Cartwright’s invention encountered from the manufacturers, stood greatly in the way of any general adoption of his loom during the period of his patent rights. Other causes, however, were concerned in this. A mill, containing five hundred of his looms, was burnt down almost immediately after its erection. He engaged in a concern for manufacturing with power-looms at Doncaster; but this proved unsuccessful. And it is not improbable, though we have not found it expressly stated, that the machine itself was not at this time able to compete, in respect of economy and beauty of workmanship, with hand labour: for during the period of his exclusive rights, two or three other persons took out patents for power-looms, without being able to make them answer. But about the year 1801, in which his patent expired, he had the pleasure of finding that his invention was coming into use to a very considerable extent; and the mortification of seeing others reap the fruit of his unrequited ingenuity. The increased demand during the war for English cotton goods, with the necessity for working up at home the cotton yarn which had hitherto been exported to the Continent, had given an impulse to the manufacture favourable to the introduction of machinery; and at the same time the power-loom was rendered much more economical by a very ingenious method, invented by Mr. Radcliffe of Stockport, about 1804, of dressing or sizing the warp, before it was placed in the loom. A cotton manufacturer of Stockport, named Horrocks, took out a patent for another power-loom in 1803. He failed; but his loom, with various modifications, is that which has now come into general use.
The following estimate, taken from ‘Baines’s History of the Cotton Manufacture,’ of the number of power-looms in Britain at various periods, though literal exactness in such a matter is unattainable, affords probably a tolerably correct measure of the rapid multiplication of these engines.
At the present time, we are told by the same authority, the machinemakers of Lancashire are making power-looms with the greatest rapidity, and they cannot be made sufficiently fast to meet the demands of the manufacturers. This quick increase, notwithstanding the considerable expense of outfit, which by employing hand-weavers the manufacturer avoids entirely, may safely be taken as a test of the advantages and national importance of the power-loom. The following estimate is given of its productiveness as compared with hand-loom labour. A very good hand-weaver, twenty-five or thirty years of age, will weavetwopieces of cloth per week, of a certain description, each twenty-four yards long. In 1833, a steam-loom weaver, from fifteen to twenty years of age, assisted by a girl about twelve years of age, attending to four looms, can weaveeighteensimilar pieces in a week; some can weave twenty pieces. It appears from the fuller statement given by Mr. Baines, that the comparative productiveness of steam-looms has rapidly increased up to the last-mentioned period, and therefore it may be conjectured not yet to have reached its maximum; and it is also stated, that in those descriptions of plain goods for which they have hitherto been chiefly used, “cloth made by these looms, when seen by those manufacturers who employ hand-weavers, at once, excites admiration, and a consciousness that their own weavers cannot equal it.” The set-off against these advantages is the interest on capital employed, and the expense of supplying power. It is not asserted by the more intelligent, either among masters or workmen, that the power-loom has been more than a secondary and minor cause of the lamentable depression and misery now existing among the hand-weavers; a depression which it is to be feared will never be removed but by the gradual relinquishment of that laborious and ill-paid trade.
The hardships of Dr. Cartwright’s case, his merits, and the extent to which the country was then profiting by his discoveries, had become, by 1807, so manifest to those who were best acquainted with the cotton trade, that a considerable number of the most respectable and influential gentlemen of Manchester presented a memorial to government, praying that some remuneration for his useful inventions might be taken into consideration. He petitioned the legislature himself to the same effect; and in 1809 obtained from parliament a grant of £10,000 for “the good service he had rendered the public by his invention of weaving.” The compensation thus awarded, though falling far short of the sums he had expended in perfecting his inventions, as well as in defending his patent-rights, contributed essentiallyto place him in comparatively easy circumstances; and being advanced in life, he was thankful to be enabled to pass the remainder of his days in tranquil retirement. The activity of his mind however was unabated. Engaged to the last in scientific pursuits, with an occasional revival of the poetic spirit of his youth, he closed his active, useful, and benevolent life at Hastings, October 30, 1823, in the eighty-first year of his age.
Like many inventors, Dr. Cartwright was negligent of his pecuniary interests: he possessed another quality less common to that class of persons, entire freedom from jealousy, and great liberality in communicating his ideas and assistance to others engaged in pursuits similar to his own. And we may fairly conjecture that the temper of mind in which such conduct originated, promoted his happiness much more than any increase to his fortune, procured by a less frank and generous spirit, could have done. It is also stated, that whether from absorption in the pursuits of the moment, or carelessness of their value, he was remarkably apt to forget his own productions, even when offered to his notice. Among other instances of this disposition, it is related, that on examining the model of one of his own machines, he expressed great admiration, and said that he should have been proud to have been the inventor of it; nor could he readily be convinced that the merit was indeed his own.
In this sketch of Dr. Cartwright’s life a limited notice only has been taken of his productions. He is chiefly known as the inventor of the power-loom; but the public are also reaping the advantage of several minor improvements in the arts of life, which emanated from his active and observing mind. It is sufficient here to state that he obtained ten patents, either for original inventions, or improvements upon his earlier mechanical attempts: and in addition to the kindred arts of weaving, spinning, wool-combing, and rope-making, he had successfully applied his talents to a variety of subjects unconnected with those manufactures.
An account of his life, containing a more detailed description of his various inventions, as well as a relation of the struggles and difficulties which he encountered, is now, we are informed, in preparation for the press. The portrait from which our engraving is taken was copied from one painted by Robert Fulton, when studying the art under his countryman, Benjamin West.
PORSON.