Hargreaves, Arkwright, Watt and Eli Whitney had worked a revolution more far-reaching than did Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre and Marat.
Here creeps in an item interesting to our friends who revel in syntax and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a "jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was called a jack, and is yet. In most factories there are testing-jacks, gearing-jacks, lifting-jacks. Falstaff tells of a jack-of-all-trades. The jack was anything strong, patient and serviceable.
When Hargreaves, the Lancashire carpenter, invented his spinning-machine, a village wit called it a "jenny." The machine was fine, delicate, subtle, and as spinning was a woman's business anyway, the new machine was parsed in the feminine gender.
Soon the new invention took on a heavier and stronger form, and its persistency suggested to some other merry bucolic a new variation and it was called a "mule." The word stuck, and the mule-spinner is with us wherever cotton is spun.
The discovery that coal was valuable for fuel followed the invention of the steam-engine.
When things are needed we dig down and find them, or reach up and secure them. You could not run a steamship, except along a river with well-wooded banks, any more than you could run an automobile with coal.
The dealing in coal, or "coals" as our English cousins still use the word, began in Eighteen Hundred Nineteen. That was the year the first steamship, the "Savannah," crossed the ocean. She ran from Savannah to London. Her time was twenty-five days. She burned four hundred fifty tons of coal, or about two-thirds of her entire carrying capacity. Robert Fulton had been running his steamer "Clermont" on the Hudson in Eighteen Hundred Seven, but there were wooding-stations every twenty miles.
It was argued in the House of Commons that no steamship could ever cross the Atlantic with steam, alone, as a propelling power. And even as it was being mathematically proved, the whistle of the "Savannah" drowned the voice of the orator.
But the "Savannah" also carried sail, and so the doubters still held the floor. An iron boat with no sails that could cross the Atlantic in five days was a miracle that no optimist had foreseen—much less, dared prophesy.
The new conditions almost threatened to depopulate the rural districts. Farmers forsook the soil. The uncertainty of a crop was replaced with the certainty of a given wage. Children could tend the spinning-jennies as well as men. There was a demand for child labor. Any poor man with a big family counted himself rich. Many a man who could not find a job at a man's wage quit work and was supported by his wife and children. To rear a family became a paying enterprise.