Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 09.djvu/228

 visited Manchester to have a model of his improved machine constructed and criticised by skilful workmen, and to enlist the aid of local manufacturers. Disappointed in this hope, and having taken out two more patents, 30 Oct. 1786 and 18 Aug. 1787, for further improvements in his loom, he set up at Doncaster a factory of his own for weaving and spinning. The power-loom worked there was the parent of that now in use, and in it an ingenious mechanism was substituted for the hands and feet of the ordinary weaver (see drawing of a portion of it, with the improvements subsequently patented in 1790, in appendix C to the Memoir of Cartwright, by his daughter, and description of it there, pp. 64–6; also the drawings of it, with extracts from the specification of 1790, in, History of Weaving, pp. 236–8). Cartwright's was not the earliest power-loom, but it was the first by which wide cloth, such as calico, was woven for practical purposes (, p. 229).

Yorkshire had for centuries been a principal seat of the woollen manufacture, and at Doncaster Cartwright invented a wool-combing machine which contributed greatly to lessen the cost of that manufacture. It was an invention more original than his power-loom. No method of combing wool but by hand appears to have been so much as thought of when Cartwright took out, in 1789, his first patent for a wool-combing machine. Its structure was essentially modified when he took out, in 1790, a second and third patent, followed by a fourth in 1792. It substituted mechanical action for manual. Even in the earlier stages of its development one machine did the work of twenty combers by hand, and by the use of a single set of the machines a manufacturer could save 1,100l. per annum (see drawings and descriptions of it in Memoir, pp. 98–100, and in, History of the Worsted Manufacture, where its initial value is spoken of disparagingly). Petitions against its use poured into the House of Commons from the wool-combers, some fifty thousand in number. So formidable seemed their opposition that Cartwright, in a counter-petition, expressed his readiness to limit the number of his machines to be used in any one year. The House of Commons appointed a committee to inquire into the matter, and nothing came of the wool-combers' agitation (Journals of the House of Commons, xlix. 322;, Memorial, read to the Society of Arts, p. 43).

Cartwright's Doncaster factory is said to have been on a limited scale, until the erection of a steam-engine in 1788 or 1789, though on visiting it Mrs. Crabbe was astonished by its magnitude (Life of Crabbe, by his son, 1847, p. 38). In 1791 a Manchester firm contracted with Cartwright for the use of four hundred of his power-looms, and built a mill in which some of them were worked by a steam-engine, at a saving, it was said, of half the wages paid to the hand-loom weavers. The Manchester mill was burned to the ground, probably by workmen, who feared to be displaced. This catastrophe prevented manufacturers from repeating the experiment. Cartwright's success at Doncaster was obstructed by opposition and by the costly character of his processes in that early stage. By 1793, having spent some 30,000l., he was deeply in debt. He relinquished his works at Doncaster, giving up his property to his creditors, transferring for their benefit also his patent rights to his brothers, John and Charles, and recording in a stoical sonnet his feelings at this destruction of his hopes.

In 1793 Cartwright removed to London, where, in a small house nearly on the site afterwards occupied by the Coliseum, he built a room with the ‘geometrical bricks,’ patented 14 April 1795, whose cost alone would have prevented their general use. He constructed a new steam-engine, for which he took out a patent in 1797, and in which alcohol was wholly or in part to be substituted for water (see drawings in, Steam-engine, i. 34–5). He now formed an intimacy with Robert Fulton, co-operating with him in experiments for the application of steam to navigation. Cartwright was one of the arbitrators appointed to settle the terms of the compensation to be given by the British government to Fulton on his suppression of a secret for blowing up ships by submarine navigation. In 1799 Cartwright was for a time candidate for the secretaryship of the Society of Arts, and prepared a ‘memorial,’ afterwards published, which gives some autobiographical details. He had been appointed a prebendary of Lincoln in 1786 (, Fasti, ii. 207) by Thurlow, then bishop of that see.

In 1800 Cartwright's patent for the wool-combing machine had only a few years to run. It was coming into use slowly, but infringements were frequent and costly to resist. He petitioned parliament to prolong his patent for fourteen years, and circulated a ‘case’ in which he told the story of his inventions and his losses by them. After an inquiry by a committee of the House of Commons, a bill prolonging the patent for fourteen years was passed in 1801. When the prolonged patent expired, Cartwright remained a loser by his invention.