Triumphs of Invention and Discovery in Art and Science Part 5

FOOTNOTES:

[A] The founder of the family of Strutt of Belper, afterwards enn.o.bled.

III.--SAMUEL CROMPTON.

Excellent as was the yarn produced by the spinning-jenny and the water-frame, compared with the old hand-spun stuff, it was coa.r.s.e 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, G.o.d-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 b.u.t.ter 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 quant.i.ty 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 whether the 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 c.o.c.k 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 in 1779, 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 c.o.c.kloft, 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 could not 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, Crompton was 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 by his 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 pa.s.sed 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] Athenaeum.

IV.--DR. CARTWRIGHT.

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 quant.i.ties 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 as the 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-weaving would 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, a.s.sociations, 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 a.s.sumed 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 his breast, 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,--

"With firm, unshaken mind, that wreck I see, Nor think the doom of man should be reversed for me."

The lion that has once eaten a man has ever after, it is said, a wild craving after human blood. And it would seem that the faculty of invention, once aroused, its appet.i.te for exercise is constant and insatiable. Cartwright having discovered his dormant powers, could no more cease to use them than to eat. A return to his quiet literary ways, fond as he still was of such pursuits, was impossible. An inventor he was, and an inventor he must continue till his eye was glazed, and his brain numbed in death. When a clergyman he set himself to study medicine, and acquired great skill and knowledge in the science, solely for the benefit of the poor parishioners, and now he gave himself up to the labours of invention with the same benevolent motives. Gain had not tempted him to enter the arena,--discouragement and ruin were not to drive him from it. The resources of his ingenuity seemed inexhaustible, and there was no limit to its range of objects. Wool-combing machines, bread and biscuit baking machines, rope-making machines, ploughs, and wheel carriages, fire-preventatives, were in turn invented or improved by him. He predicted the use of steam-ships, and steam-carriages,--and himself devised a model of the former (with clock-work instead of a steam-engine), which a little boy used to play with on the ponds at Woburn, that was to grow up into an eminent statesman--Lord John Russell. To the very last hour of his life his brain was teeming with new designs. He went down to Dover in his eightieth year for warm sea-bathing, and suggested to his bathman a way of pumping up the water that saved him the wages of two men; and almost the day before his death, he wrote an elaborate statement of a new mode he had discovered of working the steam-engine. Moved by an irresistible impulse to promote the "public weal," he truly fulfilled the resolution he expressed in verse,--

"With mind unwearied, still will I engage, In spite of failing vigour and of age, Nor quit the combat till I quit the stage."

In 1808 he was rewarded by Parliament for his invention of the power-loom, and the losses it brought upon him, by a grant of 10,000.

He died in October 1823.

V.--SIR ROBERT PEEL.

Cartwright's power-loom was afterwards taken in hand and greatly improved by other ingenious persons--mechanics and weavers. "The names of many clever mechanics," says a writer in the _Quarterly Review_, "who contributed to advance it, step by step, through failure and disappointment, have long been forgotten. Some broke their hearts over their projects when apparently on the eve of success. No one was more indefatigable in his endeavours to overcome the difficulties of the contrivance than William Radcliffe, a manufacturer at Mellor, near Manchester, whose invention of the dressing-machine was an important step in advance. With the a.s.sistance of an ingenious young weaver in his employment, named Johnson, he also brought out the dandy-loom, which effects almost all that can be done for the hand-loom as to motion.

Radcliffe was not, however, successful as a manufacturer; he exhausted his means in experiments, of which his contemporaries and successors were to derive the benefit; and after expending immense labour, and a considerable fortune in his improvements, he died in poverty in Manchester only a few years ago."

To the Peel family the cotton manufacture is greatly indebted for its progress. Robert Peel, the founder of the family, developed the plan of printing calico, and his successors perfected it in a variety of ways.

While occupied as a small farmer near Blackburn, he gave a great deal of attention to the subject, and made a great many experiments. One day, when sketching a pattern on the back of a pewter dinner-plate, the idea occurred to him, that if colour were rubbed upon the design an impression might be printed off it upon calico. He tested the plan at once. Filling in the pattern with colour on the back of the plate, and placing a piece of calico over it, he pa.s.sed it through a mangle, and was delighted with seeing the calico come out duly printed. This was his first essay in calico-printing; and he soon worked out the idea, patented it, and starting as a calico-printer, succeeded so well, that he gave up the farm and devoted himself entirely to that business. His sons succeeded him; and the Peel family, divided into numerous firms, became one of the chief pillars of the cotton manufacture.

To such perfection has calico-printing now been brought, that a mile of calico can be printed in an hour, or three cotton dresses in a minute; and so extensive is the production of that article, that one firm alone--that of Hoyle--turns out in a year more than 10,000 miles of it, or more than sufficient to measure the diameter of our planet.

It was a favourite saying of old Sir Robert Peel, in regard to the importance of commercial wealth in a national point of view, "that the gains of individuals were small compared with the national gains arising from trade;" and there can be no doubt that the success of the cotton trade has contributed essentially to the present affluence and prosperity of the United Kingdom. It has placed cheap and comfortable clothing within the reach of all, and provided well-paid employment for mult.i.tudes of people; and the growth of population to which it has led, and consequent increase in the consumption of the various necessaries and luxuries of life, have given a stimulus to all the other branches of industry and commerce. From one of the most miserable provinces in the land, Lancashire has grown to be one of the most prosperous. Within a hundred and fifty years the population has increased tenfold, and land has risen to fifty times its value for agricultural, and seventy times for manufacturing purposes. From an insignificant country town and a little fishing village have sprung Manchester and Liverpool; and many other towns throughout the country owe their existence to the same source. These are the great monuments to the achievements of Arkwright, Crompton, Peel, and the other captains of industry who wrought this mighty change, and the best trophies of their genius and enterprise.

The Railway and the Locomotive.