James Hargreaves, English inventor, author of two important improvements in the art of cotton-spinning, was born near Blackburn about 1720, died 1778.
In 1760 he invented a machine for carding, and some years after the spinning-jenny, by which he was able to spin with several spindles at once. Suspecting that he employed machinery, his neighbours broke into his dwelling and destroyed his machine; and on the repetition of this kind of persecution Hargreaves removed in 1768 to Nottingham. In 1770 he obtained a patent for his invention, but it was after all declared invalid on the ground that he had sold several of the machines before taking out the patent. For the rest of his life he carried on business as a manufacturer.
Richard
Arkwright was the youngest of thirteen children, he was bred to the trade
of a barber. When about thirty-five years of age he gave himself up exclusively to the subject of inventions for
spinning cotton. The thread spun by Hargreaves' jenny could not be used except as weft, being destitute of the
firmness or hardness required in the longitudinal threads or warp. But Arkwright supplied this deficiency by the
invention of the spinning-frame, which spins a vast number of threads of any degree of fineness and hardness, leaving
the operator merely to feed the machine with cotton and to join the threads when they happen to break. His invention
introduced the system of spinning by rollers, the carding, or roving as it is technically termed (that is, the
soft, loose strip of cotton). passing through one pair of rollers, and being received by a second pair, which are
made to revolve with (as the case may be) three, four, or five times the velocity of the first pair. By this contrivance
the roving is drawn out into a thread of the desired degree of tenuity and hardness.
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His inventions being brought into a pretty advanced state, Arkwright removed to Nottingham in 1768 in order to avoid the attacks of the same lawless rabble that had driven Hargreaves out of Lancashire. Here his operations were at first greatly fettered by a want of capital; but two gentlemen of means having entered into partnershi with him, the necessary funds were obtained, and Arkwright erected him first mill, which was driven by horses, at Nottingham, and took out a patent for spinning by rollers in 1769. As the mode of working the machinery by horse-power was found too expensive he built a second factory on a much larger scale at Cromford, in Derbyshire, in 1771, the machinery of which was turned by a water-wheel. Having made several additional discoveries and improvements in the processes of carding, roving, and spinning, he took out a fresh patent for the whole in 1775, and thus completed a series of the most ingenious and complicated machinery. | |
| Sir Richard Arkwright, famous for his inventions in cotton-spinning, was born at Preston, in Lancashire, in 1732; died 1792. | Notwithstanding a series of lawsuits in defence of his patent rights, and the destruction of his property by mobs, he amassed a large fortune. He was knighted by Georce III. in 1786. |
