Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/254

 wire cards, the original model of which is now exhibited in the South Kensington Museum.

In ‘Letters on the Utility and Policy of employing Machines to Shorten Labour,’ London, 1780—a work wholly anonymous, except for the signature ‘T.’ appended to the preface—a letter from Kay to the Society of Arts, dated 1764, is quoted as saying: ‘I have a great many more inventions than what I have given in, and the reason I have not put them forward is the bad treatment that I have had from woollen and cotton factories in different parts of England twenty years ago, and then I applied to parliament, and they would not assist me in my affairs, which obliged me to go abroad to get money to pay my debts and support my family.’ The records of the Society of Arts do not afford any corroboration of Kay's communication. It appears, however, from the minutes of the society that in April 1764 a letter was received from Robert Kay with reference to his father's wheel-shuttle. After some inquiry the secretary was instructed on 4 Dec. 1764 ‘to acquaint Mr. Kay that the society does not know any person who understands the manner of using his shuttle.’ According to ‘T.'s’ pamphlet Kay sought refuge in France, where he commenced business with the spinning machines smuggled out of England from Lancashire by one Holker some years before. He is said to have died in France in obscurity and poverty. He married a daughter of John Holl, esq., of Bury.

In summing up the value of Kay's inventions, Woodcroft says: ‘Kay's improvements in machinery for weaving continue in use to the present time; they form a part of each loom actuated by power, of which there are tens of thousands in this kingdom alone, forming cloths of silk, cotton, linen, and woollen. He was the founder of the first great improvements in the manufacture of cloth, by which employment is now given to hundreds of thousands of people, and to millions of pounds sterling’ (Brief Biographies of Inventors, pp. 5–6).

There is an original portrait of Kay at the South Kensington Museum. It has been lithographed, and has also been engraved by T. O. Barlow as one of a series of portraits of inventors of textile machinery published by Messrs. Agnew of Manchester in 1863. Kay and his fly-shuttle form the subject of one of the frescoes by Madox Brown in the Manchester town-hall.

In 1846 an attempt was made by Mr. Thomas Sutcliffe to obtain a parliamentary grant in aid of Kay's descendants, some of whom were in poor circumstances, and an appeal was issued in a large sheet containing sketches of Kay's various inventions. The appeal was unsuccessful.

(fl. 1760), the son of John Kay, invented about 1760 the ‘shuttle drop box,’ an ingenious contrivance for successively bringing shuttles carrying weft of different colours or qualities into operation. He appears to have worked in conjunction with his father.

[R. Guest's Hist. of the Cotton Manufacture, 1823; E. Baines's Hist. of the Cotton Manufacture, 1835; B. Woodcroft's Brief Biographies of Inventors, 1863; W. M. Brookes in Gent. Mag. 1867, iii. 336; Barlow's Hist. of Weaving, 1878, pp. 82, 222.] 

KAY, JOHN (1742–1826), miniature-painter and caricaturist, was born near Dalkeith in April 1742. His father, who was a mason, died when he was six years of age, and he was placed under the care of some relatives of his mother in Leith, from whom he received little kindness; and at the age of thirteen he was apprenticed to George Heriot, a barber in Dalkeith. Here he remained for six years; for seven years longer he was a journeyman barber in Edinburgh; and on 19 Dec. 1771 he purchased the freedom of the city, being enrolled a member of the Society of Surgeon-Barbers, and started in business on his own account. All the while, however, he had devoted his spare time to art; and, without any instruction in drawing, he produced many portrait sketches marked by a certain quaint originality, and possessing considerable fidelity as likenesses. His pursuits attracted the attention of the better class of his customers, and he found a warm patron in William Nisbet of Dirleton, who encouraged him in his art, invited him to his country-house, and indeed ‘grew so fond of him’ that ‘he had him almost constantly with him by night and day.’ Nisbet died in 1784, and his heir made good an annuity of 20l. which he had intended to settle upon Kay. In 1785 Kay finally relinquished his trade for art. He drew and etched many portraits, more or less caricatured. The earliest of his dated etchings is the portrait of himself, inscribed 1786. He sold his etchings in his little shop in the Parliament Close, Edinburgh, and these singly issued impressions show his prints at their best; but he was never an accomplished draughtsman or a master of the technicalities of etching. His work, which is solely of antiquarian value, affords a quaint picture of Edinburgh society in his time. He is stated by Redgrave to have etched in all nearly nine hundred plates; and drew almost every notable Scotsman of his time, with the exception of Burns. His