Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/304

290 The first attempts at the mechanical spinning of wool were made at about the same time in France and England. We read of a machine experimentally tried at Dolphin Holme in 1784, but success did not come until 1791. In 1780 the French Government gave three thousand livres to an Englishman named Price for the invention of a machine suitable for spinning combed wool.



Toward the close of the century M. Simonis, of Verviers, built a machine, by the aid of which three persons could spin four hundred hanks of yarn per day. The English succeeded about the same time in spinning combed wool upon one of Arkwright's machines.

The latter half of the eighteenth century witnessed the parturition of automatic textile manufacture. Invention seemed to suddenly awake from a lethargy of thousands of years. One labor-saving machine followed another with astonishing rapidity. The inventions of Kay, Hargreaves, Crompton, Arkwright, Watt, Cartwright, and a host of others, almost contemporaneous in point of time and general adoption, effected a revolution in every branch of textile manufacture such as had not occurred in all previous time, and whose like we can not again expect to witness. No other fifty years in the world's history are comparable with that half-century in their contribution to the world's capacity for