JAMES WATT.Page 67.
Among his multifarious pursuits, Watt had experimented a little in the powers of steam; but it was not till the winter of 1763-4, when a model of Newcomen's engine was put into his hands for repair, that he took up the matter in earnest. Newcomen's engine was then about the most complete invention of its kind; but its only value was its power of producing a ready vacuum, by rapid condensation on the application of cold; and for practical purposes was neither cheaper nor quicker than animal power. Watt, having repaired the model, found, on setting it agoing, that it would not work satisfactorily. Had it been only a little less clumsy and imperfect, Watt might never have regarded it as more than the "fine plaything," for which he at first took it; but now the difficulties of the task roused him to further efforts. He consulted all the books he could get on the subject, to ascertain how the defects could be remedied; and that source of information exhausted, he commenced a series of experiments, and resolved to work out the problem for himself. Among other experiments, he constructed a boiler which showed by inspection the quantity of water evaporated in a given time, and thereby ascertained the quantity of steam used in every stroke of the engine. He found, to his astonishment, that a small quantity of water in the form of steam heated a large quantity of water injected into the cylinder for the purpose of cooling it; and upon further examination, he ascertained the steam heated six times its weight of well water up to the temperature of the steam itself (212°). After various ineffectual schemes, Watt was forced to the conclusion that, to make a perfect steam engine, two apparently incompatible conditions must be fulfilled—the cylinder must always be as hot as the steam that came rushing into it, and yet, at eachdescent of the piston, the cylinder must become sufficiently cold to condense the steam. He was at his wit's end how to accomplish this task, when, as he was taking a walk one afternoon, the idea flashed across his mind that, as steam was an elastic vapour, it would expand and rush into a previously exhausted place; and that, therefore, all he had to do to meet the conditions he had laid down, was to produce a vacuum in a separate vessel, and open a communication between this vessel and the cylinder of the steam-engine at the moment when the piston was required to descend, and the steam would disseminate itself and become divided between the cylinder and the adjoining vessel. But as this vessel would be kept cold by an injection of water, the steam would be annihilated as fast as it entered, which would cause a fresh outflow of the remaining steam in the cylinder, till nearly the whole of it was condensed, without the cylinder itself being chilled in the operation. Here was the great key to the problem; and when once the idea of separate condensation was started, many other subordinate improvements, as he said himself, "followed as corollaries in rapid succession, so that in the course of one or two days the invention was thus far complete in his mind".
It cost him ten long weary years of patient speculation and experiment, to carry out the idea, with little hope to buoy him up, for to the last he used to say "his fear was always equal to his hope,"—and with all the cares and embarrassments of his precarious trade to perplex and burden him. Even when he had his working model fairly completed, his worst difficulties—the difficulties which most distressed and harassed the shy, sensitive, and retiring Watt—seemed only to have commenced. To give the invention a fair practical trial required an outlay of at least £1000; and one capitalist, who had agreed to join him in the undertaking, had to give it up through some business losses. Still Watt toiled on, always keeping the great object in view,—earning bread for his family (for he was married by this time), by adding land-surveying to his mechanical labours, and, in short, turning his willing hand to any honest job that offered.
He got a patent in 1769, and began building a large engine; but the workmen were new to the task, and when completed, its action was spasmodic and unsatisfactory. "It is a sad thing," he then wrote, "for a man to have his all hanging by a single string. If I had wherewithal to pay for the loss, I don't think I should so much fear a failure; but I cannot bear the thought of other people becoming losers by my scheme, and I have the happy disposition of always painting the worst." And just then, to make matters still more gloomy, he learned that some rascally linen-draper in London was plagiarizing the great invention he had brought forth in such sore and protracted travail. "Of all thingsin the world," cried poor Watt, sick with hope deferred, and pressed with little carking cares on every side, "there is nothing so foolish as inventing."
When nearly giving way to despair, and on the point of abandoning his invention, Watt was fortunate enough to fall in with Matthew Boulton, one of the great manufacturing potentates of Birmingham, an energetic, far-seeing man, who threw himself into the enterprise with all his spirit; and the fortune of the invention was made. An engine, on the new principle, was set up at Soho; and there Boulton and Watt sold, as the former said to Boswell, "what all the world desires to have,Power;"—the infinite power that animates those mighty engines, which—
"England's arms of conquest are,The trophies of her bloodless war:Brave weapons these.Victorious over wave and soil,With these she sails, she weaves, she tills,Pierces the everlasting hills,And spans the seas."
"England's arms of conquest are,The trophies of her bloodless war:Brave weapons these.Victorious over wave and soil,With these she sails, she weaves, she tills,Pierces the everlasting hills,And spans the seas."
Watt's engine, once fairly started, was not long in making its way into general use. The first steam-engine used in Manchester was erected in 1790; and now it is estimated that in that district, within a radius of ten miles, there are in constant work more than fifty thousand boilers, giving a total power of upwards of one million horses. And the united steam power of Great Britain is considered equal to the manual labour of upwards of four hundred millions of men, or more than double the number of males onthe face of the earth. From the factory at Soho, Watt's improved engines were dispersed all over the country, especially in Cornwall—the firm receiving the value of a third part of the coal saved by the use of the new machine. In one mine, where there were three pumps at work, the proprietors thought it worth while, it is said, to purchase the rights of the inventors, at the price of £2500 yearly for each engine. The saving, therefore, on the three engines, in fuel alone, must have been at least £7500 a year.
In the first year of the present century, Watt withdrew himself entirely from business; but though he lived in retirement, he did not let his busy mind get rusty or sluggish for want of exercise. At one time he took it into his head that his faculties were declining, and though upwards of seventy years of age, he resolved to test his mental powers by taking up some new subject of study. It was no easy matter to find one quite new to him, so wide and comprehensive had been his range of study; but at length the Anglo-Saxon tongue occurred to him, and he immediately applied himself to master it, the facility with which he did so, dispelling all doubt as to the failing of his stupendous intellect. He thus busied himself in various useful and entertaining pursuits, till close upon his death, which took place in 1819.
Extraordinary as was Watt's inventive genius, his wide range of knowledge, theoretic and practical, was equally so. Great as is the "idea" with which hisname is chiefly associated, he was not a man of one idea, but of a thousand. There was hardly a subject which came under his notice which he did not master; and, as was said of him, "it seemed as if every subject casually started by him had been that he had been occupied in studying." He had no doubt a rapid faculty of acquiring knowledge; but he owed the versatility and copiousness of his attainments above all to his unwearied industry. He was always at work on something or other, and he may truly be called one of those who—
"Could Time's hour-glass fall,Would, as for seed of stars, stoop for the sand,And by incessant labour gather all."
"Could Time's hour-glass fall,Would, as for seed of stars, stoop for the sand,And by incessant labour gather all."
In a recent volume of memoirs by Mrs. Schimmel Pennick, we find the following graphic sketch of this extraordinary man:—"He was one of the most complete specimens of the melancholic temperament. His head was generally bent forward or leaning on his hand in meditation, his shoulders stooping, and his chest falling in, his limbs lank and unmuscular, and his complexion sallow. His utterance was slow and impassioned, deep and low in tone, with a broad Scotch accent; his manners gentle, modest, and unassuming. In a company where he was not known, unless spoken to, he might have tranquilly passed the whole time in pursuing his own meditations. When he entered the room, men of letters, men of science, many military men, artists, ladies, and evenlittle children, thronged around him. I remember a celebrated Swedish artist being instructed by him that rat's whiskers made the most pliant painting-brushes; ladies would appeal to him on the best modes of devising grates, curing smoking chimneys, warming their houses, and obtaining fast colours."
His reading was singularly extensive and diversified. He perused almost every work that came in his way, and used to say that he never opened a book, no matter what its subject or worth, without learning something from it. He had a vivid imagination, was passionately fond of fiction, and was a very gifted story-teller himself. When a boy, staying with his aunt in Glasgow, he used every night to enthral the attention of the little circle with some exciting narrative, which they would not go to bed till they had heard the end of; and kept them in such a state of tremor and excitement, that his aunt used to threaten to send him away.
Since Watt's time, innumerable patents have been taken out for improvements in the steam engine; but his great invention forms the basis of nearly all of them, and the alterations refer rather to details than principles of action. The application of steam to locomotive purposes, however, led to the construction of the high pressure engine, in which the cumbrous condensing apparatus is dispensed with, and motion imparted to the piston by the elastic power of the steam being greater than that of the atmosphere.
"Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men who walk daily among us, clothing us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men."—Carlyle.
"Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men who walk daily among us, clothing us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men."—Carlyle.
On the 3d of May 1734, there was a hanging at Cork which made a good deal more noise than such a very ordinary event generally did in those days. There was nothing remarkable about the malefactor, or the crime he had committed. He was a very commonplace ruffian, and had earned his elevation to the gallows by a vulgar felony. What was remarkable about the affair was, that the woollen weavers of Cork, being then in a state of great distress from want of work, dressed up the convict in cotton garments, and that the poor wretch, having once been a weaver himself, "employed" the last occasion he was ever to have of addressing his fellow creatures, by assuring them that all his misdeeds and misfortunes were to be traced to the "pernicious practice of wearing cottons." "Therefore, good Christians," he continued, "consider that if you go on to suppress your own goods, by wearing such cottons as I am now clothed in, you will bring your country into misery, which will consequently swarm with suchunhappy malefactors as your present Object is; and the blood of every miserable felon that will hang after this warning from the gallows will lie at your doors."
All which sayings were no doubt greatly applauded by the disheartened weavers on the spot, and much taken to heart by the citizens and gentry to whom they were addressed.
This is only one out of the many illustrations which might be drawn from the chronicles of those days, of the prejudice and discouragement cotton had to contend against on its first appearance in this country. Prohibited over and over again, laid under penalties and high duties, treated with every sort of contumely and oppression, it had long to struggle desperately for the barest tolerance; yet it ended by overcoming all obstacles, and distancing its favoured rival wool. Returning good for evil, cotton now sustains one-sixth of our fellow-countrymen, and is an important mainstay of our commerce and manufactures.
First imported into Great Britain towards the middle of the seventeenth century, cotton was but little used for purposes of manufacture till the middle of the eighteenth. The settlement of some Flemish emigrants in Lancashire led to that district becoming the principal seat of the cotton manufacture; and probably the ungenerous nature of its soil induced the people to resort to spinning and weavingto make up for the unprofitableness of their agricultural labours.
A nobler monument of human skill, enterprise, and perseverance, than the invention of cotton-spinning machinery is hardly to be met with; but it must also be owned that its history, encouraging as it is in one aspect, is in another sad and humiliating to the last degree. It is difficult at first to credit the uniform ingratitude and treachery which the various inventors met with from the very men whom their contrivances enriched. "There is nothing," said James Watt in the crisis of his fortunes, worn with care, and sick with hope deferred—"there is nothing so foolish as inventing;" and with far more reason the inventors of cotton-spinning machines could echo the mournful cry. It is sad to think that so proud a chapter of our history should bear so dark a stain.
In 1733 the primitive method still prevailed of spinning between the finger and thumb, only one thread at a time; and weaving up the yarn in a loom, the shuttle of which had to be thrown from right to left and left to right by both hands alternately. In that year, however, the first step was made in advance, by the invention of the fly-shuttle, which, by means of a handle and spring, could be jerked from side to side with one hand. This contrivance was due to the ingenuity of John Kay, a loom-maker at Colchester, and proved his ruin. Theweavers did their best to prevent the use of the shuttle,—the masters to get it used, and to cheat the inventor out of his reward. Poor Kay was soon brought low in the world by costly law-suits, and being not yet tired of inventing, devised a rude power-loom. In revenge a mob of weavers broke into his house, smashed all his machines, and would have smashed him too, had they laid hands on him. He escaped from their clutches, to find his way to Paris, and to die there in misery not long afterwards. Kay was the first of the martyrs in this branch of invention. James Hargreaves was the next.
The use of the fly-shuttle greatly expedited the process of weaving, and the spinning of cotton soon fell behind. The weavers were often brought to a stand-still for want of weft to go on with, and had to spend their mornings going about in search of it, sometimes without getting as much as kept them busy for the rest of the day. The scarcity of yarn was a constant complaint; and many a busy brain was at work trying to devise some improvement on the common hand-wheel. Amongst others, James Hargreaves, an ingenious weaver at Standhill, near Blackburn, who had already improved the mode of cleaning and unravelling the cotton before spinning, took the subject into consideration. One day, when brooding over it in his cottage, idle for want of weft, the accidental overturning of his wife's wheel suggested to him the principle of the spinning-jenny.Lying on its side, the wheel still continued in motion—the spindle being thrown from a horizontal into an upright position; and it occurred to him that all he had got to do was to place a number of spindles side by side. This was in 1764, and three years afterwards Hargreaves had worked out the idea, and constructed a spinning frame, with eight spindles and a horizontal wheel, which he christened after his wife Jenny, whose wheel had first put him in the right track. Directly the spinners of the locality got knowledge of this machine that was to do eight times as much as any one of them, they broke into the inventor's cottage, destroyed the jenny, and compelled him to fly for the safety of his life to Nottingham. He took out a patent, but the manufacturers leagued themselves against them. Sole, friendless, penniless, he could make no head against their numbers and influence, relinquished his invention, and died in obscurity and distress ten years after he had the misfortune to contrive the spinning-jenny.
The history of the cotton manufacture now becomes identified with the lives of Arkwright, Crompton, and Cartwright—the inventors of the water-frame, the mule, and the power-loom.
Somewhere about the year 1752, any one passing along a certain obscure alley in Preston, then a mere village compared with the prosperous town intowhich it has since expanded, might have observed projecting from the entrance to the underground flat of one of the houses, a blue and white pole, with a battered tin plate dangling at the end of it, the object of which was to indicate that if he wanted his hair cut or his chin shaved, he had only to step down stairs, and the owner of the sign would be delighted to accommodate him. But either people in that quarter had little or no superfluous hair to get rid of, or they had it taken off elsewhere; for Dicky Arkwright, the barber in the cellar, for whom the pole and plate stood sponsor in the upper world, had few opportunities of displaying his talents, and spent most of his time whetting his razors on a long piece of leather, one end of which was nailed to the wall, while the other was drawn towards him, and keeping the hot water and the soap ready for the customers who seldom or never came. This sort of thing did not suit Dick's notions at all; for he was of an active temperament, and besides feeling very dull at being so much by himself all day, he pulled rather a long face when he counted out the scanty array of coppers in the till after shutting up shop for the night. As he sat one night, before tumbling into his truckle bed that stood in a recess in one corner of the dingy little room, meditating on the hardness of the times, a bright idea struck him; and the next morning the attractions of the sign-pole were enhanced by a staring placard, bearing the urgent invitation:—
COME TO THESUBTERRANEOUS BARBER!HE SHAVES FOR A PENNY!!
Now twopence, as we believe all those who have investigated the subject are agreed, was the standard charge for a clean shave at that period; and as soon as this innovation got wind, we can fancy how indignant the fraternity were at the unprincipled conduct of one of their number; how they denounced the reprobate, and prophesied his speedy ruin, over their pipes and beer in the parlour of the "Duke of Marlborough," which they patronized out of respect for that hero's enormous periwig,—in their eyes his chief title to immortality, and a bright example for the degenerate age, when people had not only taken to wearing their own hair, but were even beginning to leave off dusting it with flour! And to make matters worse, here was a low fellow offering to shave for a penny. A number of people, tickled with the originality of the placard, and not unmindful of the penny saved, began to patronize the "Subterraneous barber," and he soon drew so many customers away from the higher-priced shops, that they were obliged to come down, after a while, to a penny as well. Not to be outdone, Arkwright lowered his charge to a halfpenny, and still retained his rank as the cheapest barber in the place.
Arkwright's parents had been very poor people;and as he was the youngest of a family of thirteen, it may be readily supposed that all the school learning he got was of the most meagre kind,—if, indeed, he ever was at school at all, which is very doubtful. He was of a very ardent, enterprising temperament, however, and when once he took a thing in hand, stubbornly persevered in carrying it through to the end. About the year 1760, being then about thirty years of age, Arkwright got tired of the shaving, which brought him but a very scanty and precarious livelihood, and resolved to try his luck in a business where there was more scope for his enterprise and activity. He therefore began business as an itinerant dealer in hair, travelling up and down the country to collect it, dressing it himself, and then disposing of it in a prepared state to the wig-makers. As he was very quick in detecting any improvements that might be made in the process of dressing, he soon acquired the reputation amongst the wig-makers of supplying a better article than any of his rivals, and drove a very good trade. He had also picked up or discovered for himself the secret of dyeing the hair in a particular way, by which he not only augmented his profits, but enlarged the circle of his customers. He throve so well, that he was able to lay by a little money and to marry. He was very fond of spending what leisure time he had in making experiments in mechanics; and for a while was very much taken up with an attempt to solve the attractive problemof perpetual motion. No doubt he soon saw the hopelessness of the effort; but although he left the question unsolved, the bent thus given to his thoughts was fruitful of most valuable consequences.
Living in the midst of a manufacturing population, Arkwright was accustomed to hear daily complaints of the continual difficulty of procuring sufficient weft to keep the looms employed; while the exportation of cotton goods gave rise to a growing demand for the manufactured article. The weavers generally had the weft they used spun for them by their wives or daughters; and those whose families could not supply the necessary quantity, had their spinning done by their neighbours; and even by paying, as they had to do, more for the spinning than the price allowed by their masters, very few could procure weft enough to keep themselves constantly at work. It was no uncommon thing, we learn, for a weaver to walk three or four miles in a morning, and call on five or six spinners, before he could collect weft to serve him for the rest of the day. Arkwright must have been constantly hearing of this difficulty, and of the restrictions it placed on the manufacture of cotton goods; and being a mechanical genius, was led to think how it might be lessened, if not got rid of altogether. The idea of having an automaton spinner, instead of one of flesh and blood, had occurred before then to more than one speculator; but the thing had never answered, and no models or descriptions of the machines proposed were preserved. One inventor had, indeed, destroyed his own machine, after having constructed it and found it to work, for fear that if it came into use it would deprive the poor spinners of their livelihood,—in reality its effect would have been to provide employment and food for thousands more than at that time got a miserable living from their spinning-wheels.
While Arkwright was intent on the discovery of perpetual motion, he fell in with a clockmaker of the name of Kay, who assisted him in making wheels and springs for the contrivance he was trying to complete. This led to an intimate connection between them; and when Arkwright had given up the perpetual motion affair, and applied his thoughts to the invention of some machine for producing cotton weft more rapidly than by the simple wheel, Kay continued to help him in making models. Arkwright soon became so engrossed in his new task, and so confident of ultimate success, that he began to neglect his regular business. All his thoughts, and nearly all his time, were given up to the great work he had taken in hand. His trade fell off; he spent all his savings in purchasing materials for models, and getting them put together, and he fell into very distressed circumstances. His wife remonstrated with him, but in vain; and one day, in a rage at what she considered the cause of all their privations, she smashed some of his models on the floor. Such anoutrage was more than Arkwright could bear, and they separated.
In 1768, Arkwright, having completed the model of a machine for spinning cotton thread, removed to Preston, taking Kay with him. At this time he had hardly a penny in the world, and was almost in rags. His poverty, indeed, was such, that soon after his arrival in Preston, a contested election for a member of Parliament having taken place, he was so tattered and miserable in his appearance, that the party with whom he voted had to give him a decent suit of clothes before he could be seen at the polling-booth. He had got leave to set up his machine in the dwelling-house attached to the Free Grammar School; but, afraid of suffering from the hostility of the spinners, as the unfortunate Hargreaves had done some time before, he and Kay thought it best to leave Lancashire, and try their fortune in Nottingham.
Poor and friendless, it may easily be supposed that Arkwright found it a hard matter to get any one to back him in a speculation which people then regarded as hazardous, if not illusory. He got a few pounds from one of the bankers in the town; but that was soon spent, and further advances were refused. Nothing daunted, Arkwright tried elsewhere for help, and at length succeeded in convincing Messrs. Need and Strutt,[A]large stocking-weavers in theplace, of the value of his invention, and inducing them to enter into partnership with him. In 1769 he took out a patent for the machine, as its inventor, and a mill, worked by horse-power, was erected for spinning cotton by the new machine. Two years after, he and his partner set up another mill in Derbyshire, worked by a water-wheel; and in 1775 he took out another patent for some improvements on his original scheme.
The machinery which he patented consisted of a number of different contrivances; but the chief of these, and the one which he particularly claimed entirely as his own invention (for he frankly admitted that some of the other parts were only developments of other inventors), was what is called the water-frame throstle for drawing out the cotton from a coarse to a finer and harder twisted thread, and so rendering it fit to be used for the warp, or longitudinal threads of the cloth, which were formed of linen, as well as the weft. This apparatus was a combination of the carding and spinning machinery; and the principle of having two pairs of rollers, one revolving faster than the other, was now for the first time applied to machinery.
In a year or two the success of Arkwright's inventions was fairly established. The manufacturers were fully alive to its importance; and Arkwright now reaped the reward of all the toil and danger he had undergone in the shape of a diligent and persistent attempt to rob him of his monopoly, which was carried on for a number of years, and was at length successful. Some of the manufacturers, who were greedy to profit by the new machinery without paying the inventor, got hold of Kay, who had quarrelled with Arkwright some time before, and found him a willing instrument in their hands. It would take too long to go over all the law processes which Arkwright had now to engage in to defend his rights. Kay got up a story that the real inventor was a poor reed maker named Highs, who had once employed him to make a model, the secret of which he had imparted to Arkwright; and this was a capital excuse for using the new machinery in defiance of the patent, although the evidence at the various trials is now held completely to vindicate Arkwright's title as inventor. One law plea was lost to him, on account of some technical omission in the specifications; another restored to him the enjoyment of his monopoly; and a third trial destroyed the patent, which Arkwright never took any steps to recover.
Besides trying to defraud Arkwright of his patent-rights, the rival manufacturers, with jealous inconsistency, did their best to discountenance the use of the yarns he made, although much superior in quality to what was then in use. But Arkwright not only surmounted this obstacle, but turned it to good account, for it set him to manufacturing the yarn into stockings and calicoes, the duty on which beingsoon after lowered, in spite of the strenuous opposition of the manufacturers, turned out a very profitable speculation.
For the first five years Arkwright's mills yielded little or no profit; but after that, the adverse tide against which he had struggled so bravely changed, and he followed a prosperous and honourable career till his death, which happened in 1792. He was knighted, not for being, as he was, a benefactor to his country, but because, in his capacity of high sheriff, he chanced to read some trumpery address to the king. He left behind a fortune of about half a million sterling.
FOOTNOTES:[A]The founder of the family of Strutt of Belper, afterwards ennobled.
[A]The founder of the family of Strutt of Belper, afterwards ennobled.
[A]The founder of the family of Strutt of Belper, afterwards ennobled.
Excellent as was the yarn produced by the spinning-jenny and the water-frame, compared with the old hand-spun stuff, it was coarse and full of knots; and when a demand arose for imitations of the fine India muslins, the weavers found they could produce but a very poor piece of work with such rough materials.
Among those who were inconvenienced for want of a better sort of yarn was young Samuel Crompton, who lived with his widowed mother and two sisters in an old country house called Hall-in-the-Wood, near what was then the little rural town of Bolton in the Moors. When Samuel was only five years old his father died, and left his widow with the three children on her hands, to struggle through the world as best she could. A hard-working, energetic, God-fearing woman, she buckled to the fight with a stout heart and a resolute will. Her husband had been both farmer and weaver, like most of the men in that quarter; and she did her best to fill his place, looking after the little farm and the three cows, and working at the loom, the yarn for which she taught the bairns to spin. Whatever she took in hand she did with might and main, and the result was, her webs were the best woven, her butter the richest, her honey the purest, her home-made wines the finest flavoured of any in the district. Small as her means were, she gave her boy the best education that could be got in Bolton—first at a day-school, and afterwards, when he was old enough to take his place by day between the treadles, at a night-school. Rigid in her sense of duty, and resolute to do her own share of the work, she exacted the same from others, and kept her lad tightly to the loom. Every day he had to do a certain quantity of work; and there was no looking her in the face unless each evening saw it done, and well done too. Anxious to satisfy his mother, and yet get time for his favourite amusement of fiddle-making and fiddle-playing, Sam grew quickly sensitive of the imperfections of the machinery he had to work with. "He was plagued to deeath," he used to say, "wi' mendin' the broken threeads;" and could not help thinking many a time whetherthe jenny could not be improved so as to spin more quickly, and produce a better thread. By the time he came to man's estate, in 1774, his thoughts had settled so far into a track, that he was able to begin making a contrivance of his own, which he hoped would accomplish the object he had in view. He had a few common tools which had belonged to his father, but his own clasp-knife served nearly every purpose in his ready hands. He had his "bits of things" filed at the smithy, and to get money for materials, he fiddled at the theatre for 1s. 6d. a night. Every minute he could spare from the task-work of the day was spent in his little room over the porch of the hall in forwarding his invention. As it advanced, he grew more and more engrossed with it, and often the dawn found him still at work on it. The good folks down in Bolton were sorely puzzled to think what light it was that was so often seen glimmering at uncanny hours up at the old hall. The story went abroad that the place was haunted, and that the ghost of some former resident, uneasy from the sorrows or the sins of his past life, kept watch and ward till cock crow, with a spectral lamp. The mystery was cleared up at last. It was discovered that the ghost was only Sam Crompton "fashing himself over bits of wood and iron;" and Sam was pointed out as a "conjuror"—the cant term for inventor—when he walked through the town.
The five years of labour and anxiety bore fruit in1779, when the "mule-jenny" with its spindle carriage was finished and set to work. As its name indicates, it was an ingenious cross between the jenny and the water-frame, combining the best features of both with several novel ones, which rendered it a very valuable machine.
Just as Crompton had put the finishing touches to his mule, the weavers and spinners broke out in open riot at Blackburn, and scoured the country with the cry, "Men, not machines;" breaking every machine they could lay hands on. To keep himself out of trouble and save his mule, Crompton took it to pieces, and hid it in the roof of the hall. When the storm had swept past, he brought it out, put it together, and began to use it in his daily work. The fine yarn he turned out made quite a sensation, and the fame of his invention spread far and wide. People came from all quarters to get a sight of it; and when denied admittance, brought ladders and harrows, and climbed up to the window of the room where it stood. One pertinacious fellow actually ensconced himself for several days in the cockloft, from which he watched Crompton at work in the room below, through a gimlet hole he bored in the ceiling. Crompton lost all patience with this constant espionage. "Why couldn't folk let him enjoy his machine by himself?" he asked. A friend, whose advice he asked, urged him not to think of taking out a patent, but to make a present of his invention to the community at large. Save me from my friends, Crompton might well have cried. Simple, guileless fellow that he was, he acted on his "friend's" advice, and on a number of manufacturers putting down their names for subscriptions varying from a guinea to a crown, threw open the invention to the world. When the time came for the subscriptions to be called in, some of the manufacturers actually were base enough to refuse payment of the paltry sums they had promised, and overwhelmed with abuse the man by the fruit of whose brain they were making their fortunes. When all the money was collected, it amounted to only £60, just as much as built Crompton a new machine, with no more than four spindles.
Shy, simple, confiding, innocent of the cunning ways of the world, sadly backward in the study of mankind, and perhaps somewhat ungenial and unpractised to boot, Crompton, from the time when one would have thought he had set his foot on the first round of the ladder of fortune, went stumbling on from one misfortune to another, ill-used on every side, and unsuccessful in every effort to get on in the world. Wheedled out of his patent rights, cheated of the money promised him, his workmen lured away from him as soon as he had taught them the construction of the mule, he grew morbid and distrustful of everyone. He would have no more workmen; and as the production of his machines was thus restricted to the labours of his own hands, he couldnot compete with the large factories, who drew all the customers away from him. Peel, the father of the statesman, offered him first a lucrative place of trust, and afterwards a partnership; but he would not listen to him. He grew more wretched and discouraged every day. In despair he cut up his spinning machines, and hacked to pieces with an axe a carding machine he had invented, exclaiming bitterly, "They shall not have this too."
He then retired into comparative obscurity at Oldham, where he drudged away at weaving, farming, cow-keeping, and overseeing the poor, and found it no easy matter withal to support his family, for he had married some years before. Afterwards he re-appeared at Bolton as a small manufacturer; and there was a brief interval of sunshine. The muslin trade was very brisk, and the weavers walked about with five-pound notes stuck in their hats, and dressed out in ruffled shirts and top boots, like fine gentlemen. While this lasted Crompton found abundant sale for his superior yarn. But trade grew depressed, and the gloom settled over Crompton's life to its close.
The idea was started of getting Parliament to do something for him; but he was too independent to supplicate government officials in person. Spencer Perceval, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was willing to befriend him; but Crompton's ill luck was at his heels. On the 11th of May 1812, Cromptonwas talking with Peel and another gentleman in the lobby of the House of Commons, when Perceval walked up to them, saying, "You will be glad to know we mean to propose £20,000 for Crompton. Do you think it will be satisfactory?" Crompton walked away out of delicacy not to hear the answer. An instant afterwards there was a great shout, and a rush of people in alarm. Perceval lay bathed in his own blood, slain by the bullet of the assassin Bellingham. Crompton had lost his friend.
When the subject of a grant to the inventor of the spinning-mule was brought up in the House a few days afterwards by Lord Stanley (now Lord Derby), only £5000 was proposed. No one thought of increasing it. "Let's give the man a £100 a-year," said an honourable member; "it's as much as he can drink." So the vote was agreed to; though at that very time the duty accruing to the revenue from the cotton wool imported to be spun upon the mule was £300,000 a-year, or more than £1000 a working day. The impulse which this invention gave to the cotton manufactures of Great Britain, and the commercial prosperity to which it led, enabled the country to bear the heavy drain of the war taxes; and it has been said, with no little truth, that Crompton contributed as much as Wellington to the downfall of Napoleon. As soon as it became known, the mule-spindle took the lead in cotton-spinning machines. In 1811 above 4,600,000 mule-spindles, made byhis pattern, were in use. At the present time it is calculated that there are upwards of 30,000,000 in use in Great Britain; and the increase goes on at the rate of above 1,000,000 a-year. In France there were in 1850 about 3,000,000 spindles on Crompton's principle; and one firm of mule makers (Hibbert, Platt, and Company, of Oldham), make mules at the rate of 500,000 spindles a-year. The immense impetus given to trade, money, civilization, and comfort by this invention is almost incalculable.
The grant of £5000 was soon swallowed up in the payment of his debts, and in meeting the losses of his business. "Nothing more was ever done for him. The king, who was fond of patronizing merit, took no notice of him; his eldest son was promised a commission, which he did not get; and some time after, when struggling through life on only £100 a-year, the post of sub-inspector of the factories in Bolton became vacant; though he applied for the office, for which he was eminently qualified, he was passed over in favour of the natural son of one of the ex-secretaries of state—a man who did not know a mule from a spinning-jenny."[B]
Crompton spent his last days in poverty and privation, and died at the age of seventy-four, in 1827.
FOOTNOTES:[B]Athenæum.
[B]Athenæum.
[B]Athenæum.
In the summer of 1784 a number of gentlemen were chatting, after dinner, in a country house at Matlock in Derbyshire. Some extensive cotton-mills had recently been set up in the neighbourhood, and the conversation turned upon the wonderful inventions which had been introduced for spinning cotton. There were one or two gentlemen present connected with the "manufacturing interest," who were very bitter against Arkwright and his schemes.
"It's all very well," said one of the grumblers, "but what will all this rapid production of yarn lead to? Putting aside the ruin of the poor spinners, who will be starved because they haven't as many arms as these terrible machines, you'll find that it will end in a great deal more yarn being spun than can be woven into cloth, and in large quantities of yarn being exported to the Continent, where it will be worked up by foreign weavers, to the injury of our home manufacture. That will be the short and the long of it, mark my words."
"Well, but, sir," remarked a grave, portly, middle-aged gentleman of clerical appearance, after a few minutes' reflection, "when you talk of the impossibility of the weaving keeping up with the spinning, you forget that machinery may yet be applied to the former as well as the latter. Why may there not be a loom contrived for working up yarn as fast asthe spindle produces it. That long-headed fellow Arkwright must just set about inventing a weaving machine."
"Stuff and nonsense," returned the "practical man" pettishly, as though it were hardly worth while noticing the remarks of such a dreamer. "You might as well bid Arkwright grow the cloth ready made. Weaving by machinery is utterly impossible. You must remember how much more complex a process it is than spinning, and what a variety of movements it involves. Weaving by machinery is a mere idle vision, my dear sir, and shows you know nothing about the operation."
"Well, I must confess my ignorance on the subject of weaving," replied the clergyman; "but surely it can't be a more complex matter than moving the pieces in a game of chess. Now, there's an automaton figure now exhibiting in London, which handles the chess men, and places them on the proper squares of the board, and makes the most intricate moves, for all the world as if it were alive. If that can be done, I don't see why weaving should baffle a clever mechanist. A few years ago we should have laughed at the notion of doing what Arkwright has done; and I'm certain that before many years are over, we shall have 'weaving Johnnies,' as well as 'spinning Jennies.'"
Dr. Cartwright, for that was the clergyman's name, confidently as he foretold that machine-weavingwould be devised before long, little dreamt at that moment that he was himself to bring about the fulfilment of his own prediction. A quiet, country clergyman, of literary tastes, a scholar, and poetaster, he had spent his life hitherto in the discharge of his ministerial duties, writing articles and verses, and had never given the slightest attention to mechanics, theoretical or practical. He had never so much as seen a loom at work, and had not the remotest notion of the principle or mode of its construction. But the chance conversation at the Matlock dinner table suddenly roused his interest in the subject. He walked home meditating on what sort of a process weaving must be; brooded over the subject for days and weeks,—was often observed by his family striding up and down the room in a fit of abstraction, throwing his arms from side to side like a weaver jerking the shuttles,—and at last succeeded in evolving, as the Germans would say, from "the depths of his moral consciousness," the idea of a power-loom. With the help of a smith and a carpenter, he set about the construction of a number of experimental machines, and at length, after five or six months' application, turned out a rude, clumsy piece of work, which was the basis of his invention.
"The warp," he says, "was laid perpendicularly, the reed fell with the force of at least half a hundredweight, 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 being done, I then condescended to see how other people wove; and you will guess my astonishment when I compared their easy modes of operation with mine. Availing myself of what I then saw, I made a loom in its general principles nearly as they are now made. But it was not till the year 1787 that I completed my invention."
Having given himself to the contrivance of a loom that should be able to keep pace in the working up of the yarn with the jenny which produced it, solely from motives of philanthropy, he felt bound, now that he had devised the machine, to prove its utility, and bring it into use. To have stopped with the work of invention, would, he conceived, have been to leave the work half undone; and, therefore, at no slight sacrifice of personal inclination, and to the rupture of all old ties, associations, and ways of life, he quitted the ease and seclusion of his parsonage, abandoned the pursuits which had formerly been his delight, and devoted himself to the promotion of his invention. He set up weaving and spinning factories at Doncaster, and, bent on the welfare of his race, began the weary, painful struggle that was to be his ruin, and to end only with his life. "I have the worst mechanical conception any man can have," wrote his friend Crabbe, "but you have my best wishes.May you weave webs of gold." Alas! the good man wove for himself rather a web of dismal sack-cloth, sore and grievous to his peace, like the harsh shirts of hair old devotees used to vex their flesh with for their sins. The golden webs were for other folk's wear,—for those who toiled not with their brain as he had done, but who reaped what they had not sown.
He had invented a machine that was to promote industry, and save the English weavers from being driven from the field, as was beginning to be the case, by foreign weavers; and masters and men were up in arms against him as soon as his design was known. His goods were maliciously damaged,—his workmen were spirited away from him,—his patent right was infringed. Calumny and hatred dogged his steps. After a succession of disasters, his prospects assumed a brighter aspect, when a large Manchester firm contracted for the use of four hundred looms. A few days after they were at work, the mill that had been built to receive them stood a heap of blackened ruins.
Still, he would not give up till all his resources were exhausted,—and surely and not slowly that event drew nigh. The fortune of £30,000 with which he started in the enterprise melted rapidly away; and at length the day came when, with an empty purse, a frame shattered with anxiety and toil, but with a brave, stout heart still beating in hisbreast, Cartwright turned his back upon his mills, and went off to London to gain a living by his pen. As he turned from the scene of his misfortunes, he exclaimed,—