Triumphs of Invention and Discovery in Art and Science Part 4

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 things in 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."

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 on the 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 his name is chiefly a.s.sociated, 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-gla.s.s 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 impa.s.sioned, deep and low in tone, with a broad Scotch accent; his manners gentle, modest, and una.s.suming. In a company where he was not known, unless spoken to, he might have tranquilly pa.s.sed 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 even little 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 pa.s.sionately 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 c.u.mbrous 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.

The Manufacture of Cotton.

I.--KAY AND HARGREAVES.

II.--SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT.

III.--SAMUEL CROMPTON.

IV.--DR. CARTWRIGHT.

V.--SIR ROBERT PEEL.

The Manufacture of Cotton.

"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.

I.--KAY AND HARGREAVES.

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 a.s.suring 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 such unhappy 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 princ.i.p.al seat of the cotton manufacture; and probably the ungenerous nature of its soil induced the people to resort to spinning and weaving to make up for the unprofitableness of their agricultural labours.

A n.o.bler 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 ingrat.i.tude 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. The weavers 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.

II.--SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT.

Somewhere about the year 1752, any one pa.s.sing along a certain obscure alley in Preston, then a mere village compared with the prosperous town into which 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 d.i.c.ky 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 d.i.c.k'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 THE SUBTERRANEOUS 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 t.i.tle 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 problem of 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 quant.i.ty, 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 a.s.sisted 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 an outrage 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 the place, 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 coa.r.s.e 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 t.i.tle 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 being soon 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.