Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/307

Rh bobbins, and driving the latter by worsted bands. It is worth noting that James Watt obtained his first patent on the steam-engine in this same memorable year 1769. Thus the indispensable auxiliary of manufacturing evolution—the power to drive the machines that were to supersede the hands had a contemporaneous birth. Long prior to the application of steam-power other agencies than human strength were utilized to drive these primitive machines. We read of asses harnessed to them, and Arkwright drove his first spinning machines with the aid of a bull. The English manufacturers were never able to utilize water-power for driving their machinery to the extent that it was applied in the earlier manufactures of the United States. The streams of New England were long the only motive power of her machinery; and their value to-day, in the various processes of the woolen manufacture, is beyond calculation.

Paul and Wyatt taught the world how to spin a hundred or more threads at one operation; but years elapsed after these early inventions before they came into general use. Paul worked his own machines for many years; but when he died they were broken up and sold, and the world continued to spin on the foot-wheel. The tardy realization of the value of these inventions was due primarily to the opposition of the hand operatives to the introduction of anything in the nature of improved machinery. The guilds were strong, and determined in their refusal to operate or tolerate new devices for dispensing with hand labor. Poor John Kay, after inventing his fly-shuttle, was compelled to close his mill at Leeds by the riotous hostility of the hand-weavers. Learning that he was also engaged in devising machinery for spinning, a mob broke into his house, destroyed everything it contained, and would have killed the inventor himself had not friends smuggled him away in a wool-sheet. We need not be surprised at the blind brutality of these ignorant workingmen. They looked upon the inventor as an enemy, planning to take the bread from their mouths. But what shall we say of the manufacturers who stole the patents of Kay, without recognition of the service his genius had done them? And what shall we say of the Government which permitted this man, in his old age, without recompense for inventions which added untold millions to the wealth of his country, to seek refuge from persecution in France, there to die in abject penury?

It needed a man of the determination of Richard Arkwright to force the world to appreciate the opportunity which these inventions opened before it. In 1775 Arkwright obtained a patent, the specifications of which contained the drawing rollers patented by Lewis Paul in 1738; the roving-can used by Benjamin Buller in 1759; the main cylinder and the finishing cylinder, both used