1760-1783.j INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION-DUKE OF BRIDGEWATER. 41 labours of these men had increased the resources of their country to an extent which chiefly enabled it to sustain the pressure of the most tremendous war in which it ever was engaged; had bestowed upon a population increasing beyond all previous example abundant opportunities of profitable labour; and had opened new and unlimited fields of production, for the multiplication and diffusion of the necessaries of life and of the comforts and refinements of civilization. Whilst tracing the individual course of these remarkable contemporaries, we cannot fail to perceive what an intimate connection of apparently diverging purposes existed between each and all,-how, whilst Brindley, Arkwright, Crompton, Cartwright, Roebuck, Wedgwood, and, greatest of all, Watt, each pursued his one absorbing object, there was a natural harmony in their labours,-how no one attempt could have been carried to perfection without the aid of another effort, differing in degree but the same in kind. In the old timbered manor-house of Worsley, about six or seven miles from Manchester, there were three men, in 1758, daily occupied in discussing one of the boldest schemes of public improvement that had ever been devised by associated or private enterprise. One of these men was Francis Egerton, third duke of Bridgewater. He was in his twenty-second year. Of weak health as a boy, his education had been neglected; but he had travelled, and had seen much of the unsatisfactory pleasures of the life of London, at a period somewhat notorious for the dissolute manners of the great. He had endured a matrimonial disappointment, and had retired to this one of his family estates, to pursue a course of the strictest economy, and to devise plans for the improvement of his fortune, by making his encumbered property more productive. The estate of Worsley contained a rich bed of coal, but it was comparatively valueless. Within an easy distance was the great town of Manchester, and its suburbs, with a population of about 40,000, ready to welcome an additional supply of fuel for domestic and manufacturing uses. But Worsley and its neighbourhood could not supply coal so cheaply by land carriage as the pits on the other side of the town. Liverpool, also, offered a vast market, if coal could be cheaply conveyed thither from Manchester; but the water carriage was twelve shillings per ton, and the land carriage was two pounds per ton. Could these difficulties be surmounted? Could a canal be constructed from Worsley to Manchester? Might the line not be extended to the Mersey? Such were the ideas that pressed upon the inquiring mind of the young nobleman in his self-enforced solitude. There was a neighbouring canal in course of construction, which arose out of an Act passed in 1755 for making the Sankey-Brook navigable, and finally a canal was opened in 1760, following the course of the stream. It was a work in which the country through which it passed presented few difficulties. But the duke of Bridgewater had grander views. He would adopt a line which should render locks unnecessary-which should cross rivers and cut through hills, like the railway-works of our own time. The duke had made two energetic men the confidential participators in his schemes. One was John Gilbert, a land agent, who had been engaged in mining speculations; and who was especially useful in raising money to carry on the projected operations. The other was James Brindley, a millwright,-almost without the rudiments of education, and totally deficient in scientific training. This extraordinary 42 BRINDLEY-HIS FIRST GREAT WORKS. [1760-1783. man, the greatest civil engineer that had appeared in England before the present century-one whose constructive genius enabled him to overcome difficulties which appeared insuperable to other engineers of more technical pretensions-was twenty years older than his adventurous employer. He had effected some improvements in machinery, and had obtained a small provincial reputation. But when the professional men and the general public looked upon stupendous mounds of earth raised in deep valleys, and heard of an aqueduct to be carried over the Irwell, high enough for masted vessels to sail under it-when they inquired whence the supply of water was to be drawn to fill a canal of nine miles in length-they came to the conclusion that the duke and his engineer were equally mad, and that the project would end in total ruin. We have now become familiar with engineering difficulties far more vast; and can therefore scarcely forbear to smile at such forebodings. The aqueduct at Barton was opened in 1761. It has been said that when the moment arrived for admitting the water into this aqueduct, "Brindley's nerve was unequal to the interest of the crisis, that he ran away and hid himself, while Gilbert remained cool and collected to superintend the operation which was to confirm or confute the clamour with which the project had been assailed." * The subterranean canals in the coal-works at Worsley were as remarkable as the canal itself, and its branches. The open works, all of one level, extended thirty-eight miles; the tunnels were originally about a mile and a half in length, although they now extend forty-two miles, of which two-thirds have gone out of use. When the works, above ground and under ground, * "Quarterly Review," vol. lxxiii. p. 311-a delightful paper by the late earl of Ellesmere. 1760-1783.] THE CANAL SYSTEM. were finished in 1762, they were described as "the greatest artificial curiosity The immediate effect of the duke of Bridgewater's first in the world."* great undertaking was sufficiently demonstrative of the public value of canals. The price of coals in Manchester was reduced one half after its completion. The duke and his brother-in-law, the first marquis of Stafford, were the chief promoters of the Grand Trunk Navigation, generally known as the Staffordshire Canal; and Brindley was the engineer. This work brought the iron and pottery districts into easy communication with the Mersey and the Trent. A letter dated from Burslem, in 1767, contains an interesting notice of the engineer: "Gentlemen come to view our eighth wonder of the world, the subterraneous navigation, which is cutting by the great Mr. Brindley, who handles rocks as easily as you would plum-pies, and makes the four elements subservient to his will. He is as plain a looking man as one of the boors of the Peak, or one of his own carters; but when he speaks, all ears listen, and every mind is filled with wonder at the things he pronounces to be practicable." Brindley did not live to complete the Grand Trunk. But this, and concurrent undertakings which he designed or superintended, connected the Thames, the Humber, the Severn, and the Mersey, and united London, Liverpool, Bristol, and Hull, by water communication, passing through a district unsurpassed in natural resources and productive industry. Fourteen years after the duke of Bridgewater had established his claim to be called "the father of British inland navigation," the eventual success of these undertakings was regarded somewhat doubtfully: "Canals for carrying on inland navigation are new, and lately introduced, so as not to warrant great commendations; but the prospect is fair." Again: "What the actual advantages that will be derived from these canals, when finished, may be, time and experience only can determine." In 1794, the extent of canal speculation produced the inevitable protest against "bold and precarious adventure." There were the same rivalries of competing lines as we have seen in railways, and the same losses and disappointments. Yet the grandeur of these works excited the admiration even of those who doubted their eventual profit. "At the beginning of this century, it was thought a most arduous task to make a high road for carriages over the hills and moors which separate Yorkshire from Lancashire, and now they are pierced through by three navigable canals." § The local historian of Manchester, who thus looks with a mixture of apprehension and of wonder at canal enterprise, says, "Nothing but highly flourishing manufactures can repay the vast expense of these designs." He adds, as if to enforce his doubts, that when the plans under execution are finished, Manchester "will probably enjoy more various water communications than the most commercial town of the Low Countries has ever done." The principal cause of this sudden increase to the power of cheap carriage possessed by Manchester,-a power greater than that which made the prosperity of Ghent and Bruges,-was, that within a quarter of a century it had become the Metropolis of Cotton,-the centre of that manufacture which, from very small beginnings, had grown into proportions then deemed Kippis; "Biographia Britannica," art. Brindley. Campbell's "Political Survey," vol. ii. p. 261 & p. 265. § Aikin's "Manchester," 1795, p. 137. + Ibid., p. 601. ¡ Ibid, p. 137. 44 COTTON MANUFACTURE-THE FLY-SHUTTLE. [1760-1783. gigantic, however dwarf-like they may appear in comparison with its present developement. The population, busy in the middle of the eighteenth century with "small things called Manchester ware," had passed away.* Waggons had driven out pack-horses for the conveyance of goods. Canals had come, in great part, to supersede waggons. But the Manchester merchant still sent out his "riders" with patterns in their saddle-bags; and the manufacturer did not disdain to mix with the humbler tradesman in a common public-house, to take his glass of punch, and hear the news of the town. There was such a house of great resort in the market-place, which had been kept by the same landlord for half a century: "It is not unworthy of remark, and to a stranger is very extraordinary, that merchants of the first fortunes quit the elegant drawing-room, to sit in a small dark dungeon, for this house cannot with propriety be called by a better name; but such is the force of long-established custom." + It is asserted in a pamphlet published in 1788, that "not above twenty years before that time, the whole cotton trade of Great Britain did not return £200,000 to the country for the raw materials, combined with the labour of the people." This calculation takes us back to the period at which was invented the hand-machine for spinning cotton, termed "a jenny." A previous invention in the process of weaving stimulated the mechanical attempts for increasing the quantity of yarn to be woven. About 1760, the cotton weavers began to use a simple but efficacious plan of throwing the shuttle, introduced by John Kay, of Bury, "which enabled the weaver to make twice as much cloth as he made before." This was called "the flyshuttle." The greater speed attained in the weaving process, "destroyed the arrangement which up to that time existed between the quantity of yarn spun and the weavers' demand for it."§ John Kay was subsequently "mobbed out of the country, and died in obscurity in a foreign land." This was probably in consequence of some further invention to supply the place of handlabour in spinning wool, to which the fly-shuttle was originally applied. Dyer, in his poem of "The Fleece," published in 1757, having noticed the spinning-wheel, the distaff, and wheels, "double spoled, which yield to either hand a several line," says that "patient art, "Sagacious, has a spiral engine formed, Which, on an hundred spoles, an hundred threads, The writer of a very able article on "Cotton-spinning machines" implies that this was supposed to be a spinning machine, introduced into Yorkshire by John Kay. Robert Anderson, the editor of the valuable edition of "British Poets" published in 1795, appends this note to the passage in "The Fleece: "—" Paul's engine for cotton and fine wool." Lewis Paul, in 1738, took out a patent for a machine "for the spinning of wool and cotton in a manner entirely new." Several attempts were made to work this machine, persons of some note being concerned in the speculation, amongst others, Edward Cave, the proprietor of "The Gentleman's Magazine." But * Ante, vol. v. p. 24. Aikin, p. 189. + Ibid, p. 178. 1760-1783.] COTTON SPINNING MACHINE-THE JENNY. 45 Paul's machine, however ingenious, brought losses upon all concerned in it, and was finally abandoned. The demand for fine yarn still went on unsupplied; and it was increased by a growing market for fabrics in which it was endeavoured to compete with Indian muslins. An extensive manufacture of fabrics composed wholly of cotton does not appear to have been contemplated a few years before this period. "Bombaya's wharfs," writes Dyer, " pile up "Wool-resembling cotton, shorn from trees, Not to the fleece unfriendly; whether mixed The demand increased more and more, and it pressed on invention to find modes of supply. In 1764 the Society of Arts voted fifty pounds to Mr. Harrison "for a masterly improvement in the spinning-wheel, by which a child may do double the business that even a grown person can with the common wheel." At length a great practical change was achieved. In 1767, James Hargreaves completed his "Spinning-jenny." He was a weaver near Blackburn, and his wife and children were employed in spinning weft for him to work upon at his loom, the warp being supplied by the wholesale manufacturers who gave him employment. The spindle of the spinning-wheel was always horizontal, as may be seen in the following engraving: |