Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/479

Rh woolen exports, no other country even approaching our own as a consumer of English woolens. No wonder Great Britain took drastic steps to preserve this splendid market.

Neither of these pioneer enterprises was a success, either mechanically or financially. The machinery was imperfect and inadequate, and the projectors learned by sad experience that they could not equal the British fabrics either in quality or in price. The Hartford factory struggled along until 1795, when the machinery—consisting of eight looms, two carding machines, one spinning jenny, one twisting machine, and other odd implements—was sold at auction.

The year before the collapse of the Hartford factory the first incorporated woolen company in the United States began operations at By field, Mass. The Byfield factory was operated for five years under the superintendence of John and Arthur Scholfield, two ingenious Englishmen, who are commonly spoken of as the first woolen manufacturers in the United States, in the same sense that Samuel Slater is described as the pioneer cotton manufacturer. It is certain that theirs was the first instance of a successful woolen manufactory with improved machinery of a character which entitled it to rank with the mills which were plentiful in Great Britain at the date of which we are speaking. The Scholfields introduced a new carding machine, of their own construction, based upon the machines they had seen in operation in their native land. It was adapted to water-power, and the beginning of the new era of woolen manufacture in the United States fairly dates from it.

For many years prior it was vaguely realized in the United States that the world was upon the eve of a new and strange industrial development, from participation in which this country seemed to be excluded by laws designed to keep it industrially dependent. Tench Coxe states that he first became aware in 1786 that labor-saving machinery for spinning was being largely used in Great Britain, and he then made unsuccessful efforts to obtain models of these machines. The mother-country, thoroughly awake by this time to the significance of the textile inventions of her citizens, had passed laws by which she hoped to retain the monopoly of the rich harvest their ingenuity promised. The first of these statutes, enacted in 1774, a few years after Arkwright's successful inauguration of the factory system with his new appliances, was entitled "an act to prevent the exportation to foreign parts of the utensils made use of in the cotton, linen, woolen, and silk manufactures of this kingdom"; and its purpose, as set forth in the preamble, was "to preserve as much as possible to his Majesty's British subjects the benefits arising from these great and valuable branches of trade and commerce." The statute