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. 6s. 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 1784, 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 neighbourhood 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 had 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. 1760-1783.] DR. ROEBUCK. active mind of a scholar, who was previously conscious of no aptitude for mechanical pursuits. His parliamentary reward did not repay his expenses in working out his scheme. The history of the cotton-manufacture, as of most other arts, abounds with examples of the struggles of inventors, if not against neglect and fraud, against the almost insuperable difficulties of carrying forward an invention to Bentham has expressed a great truth in forcible words: commercial success. "As the world advances, the snares, the traps, the pitfalls, which inexperience has found in the path of inventive industry, will be filled up by the fortunes and the minds of those who have fallen into them and been ruined. In this, Dr. John the ages gone by have been the forlorn hope, which other career, as in every has received for those who followed them the blows of fortune."* Roebuck, "who may be said to have originated the modern iron manufacture of Britain, though his merits as a great public benefactor have as yet received but slight recognition," + was one of those who encountered the snares and pitfalls in the path of inexperience. We have shown what the iron manufacture was in 1740. In 1774, we find it alleged that "there is no room to doubt, that in every one of the three kingdoms there may be enough iron found to supply all the British dominions, and yet we import very large quantities from the North, from Spain, and from America. The reason of "It is earnestly to be this is, because the inhabitants of these countries can make it cheaper." They had a great command of fuel for charcoal. wished," says the writer, "that, as it hath been often proposed and promised, the use of pit-coal could be generally introduced, so as to answer in all respects as well as charcoal." He adds, "at this time, as I have been wellinformed, iron is wrought with pit-coal at the Carron Works in North Britain." The founder of these Carron Works, and the inventor of the economical processes which first gave cheap iron to our country, in many forms of utility, was Dr. John Roebuck. The man who succeeded in proving, by the commercial results of his processes, that iron could be smelted by pit-coal, everywhere in abundance, instead of by charcoal from woods that were disappearing through the advance of agriculture, was a physician at Birmingham. He was a scientific chemist, as far as the science of chemistry was understood in the middle of the eighteenth century; and he was connected with a chemical manufactory, to which he devoted himself with the ardour of an experimentalist. By his improvements in the production of sulphuric acid (then called vitriolic acid), the use of which was even then extensive in manufactures, he reduced the price of that article to a fourth of its previous cost. He was one of those who led the way in those great chemical discoveries which have produced as wonderful changes in the productive power of the country as machinery has produced. Sulphuric acid, after Roebuck's time, partially did the work of bleaching that the sun and air were necessary to complete. But his attempts to connect bleaching processes with the vitriol works that he established at Preston Pans were not successful. Having abandoned his practice as a physician, and settled in Scotland, he turned his thoughts to smelting and manufacturing "Manual of Political Economy." +"Quarterly Review," vol. civ. p. 78. |