History of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain: with a notice of its early history in the East, and in all the quarters of the globe ... and a view of the present state of the manufacture / By Edward Baines, jun.

  • Baines, Edward, Sir, 1800-1890.
Date:
[1835]
    perfected: its construction would probably occupy the author, who was a poor man, and had to work for his daily bread, some years: and as Hargreaves went to Nottingham in 1768, before which time his machine had not only been perfected, but its extraordinary powers so clearly proved, notwithstanding his efforts to keep it secret, as to expose him to persecution and the attacks of a mob, I am strongly disposed to think that the invention was conceived, and that the author began to embody it, as early as 1764. Hargreaves, though illiterate and humble, must be regarded as one of the greatest inventors and improvers in the cotton manufacture. His principal invention, and one which shewed high mechanical genius, was the jenny. The date of this invention was some years before Arkwright obtained the patent for his water-frame; and it differs so completely from that machine, and from Wyatt’s, that there can be no suspicion of its being other than a perfectly original invention. It may be necessary to explain to some readers, that the cotton was formerly, and is still, reduced from the state of the fleecy roll called a carding, into the state of spun thread, by repeated, though similar operations: may have given rise to the belief that he was the original inventor. The recol- lections of two aged men, concerning precise dates, after the lapse of sixty years, and concerning the precise form of a machine seen by them in mere boyhood, are little to be relied upon, especially for the purpose of overturning the claims of a most ingenious man, the patentee of the invention, and whose pretensions were never disputed till the appearance of Mr. Guest’s book. Highs, however, has a third claim as an inventor; he stated, on Arkwright’s patent trial, that he made a perpetual carding in the year 1773, which was before any other person did the same thing. It is certain that he was an extremely ingenious man, and he con- tinued to make spinning machines till he was disabled by a stroke of the palsy, about the year 1790. He was supported in his old age by the liberality of Peter Drinkwater, Esq., of Manchester, and others, and died on the 13th December 1803, aged eighty-four years.
    the first draws out the carding, and gives it a very slight twist, so as to make it into a loose thread, about the thickness of a candle-wick, in which state it is called a roving or slubbin; the subsequent processes draw out the roving much finer, and at length reduce it into yarn. Hargreaves’s jenny, like Arkwright’s machine, was in- tended to spin the roving into yarn; but it was not, like Arkwright’s, capable of being applied to the preparation of the roving itself. Hargreaves is said to have received the original idea of his machine from seeing a one- thread wheel overturned upon the floor, when both the wheel and the spindle continued to revolve.* The spindle was thus thrown from a horizontal into an upright position; and the thought seems to have struck him, that if a number of spindles were placed upright, and side by side, several threads might he spun at once. He contrived a frame, in one part of which he placed eight rovings in a row, and in another part a row of eight spindles. The rovings, when extended to the spindles, passed between two horizontal bars of wood, forming a clasp, which opened and shut somewhat like a parallel ruler; when pressed together, this clasp held the threads fast. A certain portion of roving being extended from the spindles to the wooden clasp, the clasp was closed, and was then drawn along the horizontal frame to a considerable distance from the spindles, by which the threads were lengthened out, and reduced to the proper tenuity; this was done with the spinner’s left hand, and his right hand at the same time turned a wheel, which caused the spindles to revolve rapidly, and thus the roving was spun into yarn. * Rees’s Cyclopaedia, and Encyclopaedia Britannica, art. “ Cotton Manu- facture.”
    By returning the clasp to its iirst situation, and letting down a presser wire, the yarn was wound upon the spindle. (See PL 4.) With this admirable machine, though at first rudely constructed, Hargreaves and his family spun weft for his own weaving. Aware of the value of the invention, but not extending his ambition to a patent, he kept it as secret as possible for a time, and used it merely in his own business. A machine of such powers could not, however, be long concealed; but when it became the subject of rumour, instead of gaining for its author admiration and gratitude, the spinners raised an outcry that it would throw multitudes out of employment, and a mob broke into Hargreaves’s house, and destroyed his jenny. So great was the persecution he suffered, and the danger in which he was placed, that this victim of popular ignorance was compelled to flee his native county, as the inventor of the fly-shuttle had been before him. Thus the neighbourhood where the machine was invented, lost the benefit of it, yet without preventing its general adoption;—the common and appropriate punishment of the ignorance and selfishness which oppose mechanical improvements. Hargreaves retired to Nottingham in 1768, where he entered into partnership with Mr. Thomas James, a joiner, who raised sufficient money to enable them to erect a small mill. He took out a patent for the jenny in 1770, the year after Arkwright had obtained his patent at the same place. The patent was “ for a method of making a wheel or engine of an entire new construction, and never before made use of, in order for spinning, drawing, and twisting of cotton, and to be managed by one person only, and that the wheel or
    EESHER, SOR. & C? lOSDOJS, 183S .
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