Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/305

Rh the production of the people's clothing. The automatic manufacture of wool received an impetus during these years so prodigious that we are filled with wonder and astonishment as we record the successive steps in the evolution.

Richard Arkwright has been called the father of the modern textile industry. This unique fame has securely and justly fallen to the humble barber who earned fortune, knighthood, and immortality by the keen, practical insight which combined, utilized, and perfected the inventions of others. The genesis of automatic textile machinery was before his advent, however, and he was the adapter rather than the inventor of the spinning-frame. In 1738 John Wyatt, of Birmingham, a man of education and ingenuity, worked out what he termed a "spinning-engine without hands," a machine subsequently improved and patented by Lewis Paul. Probably the two men shared the honor of the invention between them, while Paul obtained subsequent patents for spinning. In the specifications attached to Paul's application for a patent, the art of spinning by means of rollers was described for the first time. The cotton or wool being prepared in a rope or sliver of equal thickness, "one end of the sliver"—so read his specifications"—is put between a pair of rollers, or cylinders, or some such movement, which, being turned round by their motion, draw in the raw mass of wool or cotton to be spun in proportion to the velocity given to the rollers. As the sliver passes regularly through or betwixt these rollers, a succession of other rollers, moving proportionately faster than the first, draw the sliver into any degree of fineness that may be required."

These rollers are the mechanical substitutes for the thumb and finger. The Rev. John Dyer, in his poem on The Fleece, describes in rhyme the operation of the machine, and our readers may contrast this process with the distaff-spinning described by Catullus in the similar meter already quoted:

 A circular machine, of new design, In conic shape: it draws and spins a thread Without the tedious toil of needless hands. A wheel, invisible, beneath the floor, To ev'ry member of th' harmonious frame Gives necessary motion. One, intent, O'erlooks the work; the carded wool, he says, Is smoothly lapp'd around those cylinders, Which, gently turning, yield it to yon cirque Of upright spindles, which, with rapid whirl, Spin out in long extent, an even twine."

About 1701 James Hargreaves, of Lancaster County, devised an ingenious and practical method of mechanical spinning, without the use of drawing rollers, which he called the spinning