The Boyhood of Great Inventors

by A. Fraser Robertson

Arrived at Nottingham, Arkwright tried to get someone to help him with money. This brave man had firm faith in his invention and firm faith in himself. It was simply impossible to discourage him. But the time of waiting was long and weary before he fell in with a Mr. Strutt, the inventor of the stocking-frame. An inventor himself, perhaps he was the man who could best understand and appreciate Arkwright’s invention. The two entered into partnership, and it may have seemed to Arkwright that his time of trial and waiting had at last come to an end.

And now truly enough he had his foot firmly planted on the ladder of success. Behind him was a hard and toilsome boyhood. Before him were still long waiting, difficulties to face, men’s opposition to overcome, dislike, distrust, envy, and jealousy to live down and conquer. But the first step had been taken, and never once along the difficult way do we find him flinch.

In 1769, the same year in which James Watt patented his Condensing Steam Engine, Arkwright at the age of thirty-seven took out the patent for his Spinning-Frame. His next step was to erect a cotton mill at Chorley, and following that, one at Cromford, in Derbyshire. No sooner were they finished than men flocked from Lancashire, and indeed from all parts of England, to see them at work. They were the gazing-stock of the country.

But Arkwright’s brain was not the only one that had pondered on cardings and rollers and wheels and spindles, and soon there sprang up men who said this invention was not all his. He had taken other men’s thoughts and adapted them, and joined them together, and called the whole his own. And now there followed hard years of opposition, fightings, struggles, before which a weaker man than Arkwright would have gone down. But nothing discouraged or defeated him. Not even five years of weary waiting, an expenditure of £12,000, and yet no profit from his invention! His brave spirit was still undaunted. Men did not try to hide their envy and jealousy. They fell upon his mill at Chorley in mobs of hundreds. A strong force of police, and even of the military, was called out to quell the rioters. Two of them were shot dead, one was drowned, and several were wounded; while the rest smashed every machine they could lay hands on, everything that was worked by horse-power or by water-power, sparing only and alone what human hands could undertake. And it was not the workmen only who, with blind or short-sighted eyes, looked on machinery as a curse, believing that it would rob them of their living, but the better, more enlightened classes as well, who regarded Arkwright as an enemy to mankind. They were doubtless at the same time looking to their pockets. If working men were thrown out of work, it meant that they would have larger poor rates to pay, and so they too fell upon Arkwright, not seeing that here was the man ready and anxious, if they would but listen to him, to give thousands of people work where now instead only hundreds had it.

Meantime he faced his opponents, showing always a brave front, and trying to defend himself at every point. He endured the spoiling of his property, and then, not content with browbeating him, they seized upon his patent rights and disputed them. And the upshot was that Arkwright’s patent was set aside by Parliament. But even then the great inventor was not overwhelmed. Passing by the hotel where some of his enemies were standing after his defeat, he overheard one say to another—

“Well, we have done for the old shaver at last.” Arkwright turned round, ready, cool, immovable.

“Never mind,” he said, “I have a razor left in Scotland that will shave you all yet.”

He had first tried horse-power for his mills. Now he was trying water-power, and he foresaw that Lanark, in Scotland, so well situated on the Clyde for his purpose, would furnish him with all that was wanted.

Meantime, cotton was gradually growing to a great industry in England. People who had looked suspiciously and enviously on Arkwright at first now reluctantly admitted that his goods were the best to be had, and by-and-by it was he who fixed the prices in the market. It was as if by his own efforts he had created a little world. The originality of each part of his invention, may not entirely have been his. This part or that—a roller, a carding, a crank, a spindle—one of these may have belonged to some other man, but to Arkwright belongs the joining of all together. It was his master mind that collected under one roof the whole series of machines, from the engine that received the cotton-wool, much as it came from the pod, to that which wound it in bobbins—a hard and firm cotton-yarn. It was he who made each thing dovetail into the other, who worked out the one perfect, harmonious whole. His, too, was the strong mind that trained men and boys—never before used to machinery—to its irksomeness, its regularity, its exactitude, taking them from idle, desultory lives, it might be, and accustoming them to system and discipline. In the old days the slow sale of the yarn and the stupidity of workmen had sometimes almost daunted him, but these days were past.

And how the man worked!—with a quick, all-grasping mind. It was the boy over again in his underground cellar, unwilling to be worsted in his “penny a shave,” striking out the bold line of a halfpenny one. Riches from his machines—and even more from his mills—flowed in upon him. He was a man of no small account now. England had come to identify the name of Arkwright with an open door to a great source of wealth for the land. King George III. knighted him, and a year later he was made High Sheriff of Derbyshire. But still he went on working, managing, superintending his mills and his machinery—leading a life of sacrifice. As he had done when a boy, so still as a man, he made the very most of his time, even grudging that spent on a journey, and generally travelling with four horses in order to overtake it quickly. He who had lived as a boy in an underground cellar, now occupied a magnificent mansion, and was a man of note in the county and in England. But we remember, and not without sadness, how for long in the midst of his hard work he was a victim to bodily suffering—subject to severe asthma—and how bravely and uncomplainingly he bore up and struggled on in spite of all! Now, already early—while he was but in his sixtieth year—he began to fail. Asthma was complicated with other disorders. There were, too, the strain and stress of a life of hard work, and these reached a climax while the great man was still in the zenith of his mental powers, and he passed away on the 3rd August, 1792.