ARKWRIGHT, SIR RICHARD (1732-1792), English inventor, was born at Preston in Lancashire, on the 23rd of December 1732, of parents in humble circumstances. He was the youngest of thirteen children, and received but a very indifferent education. After serving his apprenticeship in his native town, he established himself as a barber at Bolton about 1750, and later amassed a little property from dealing in human hair and dyeing it by a process of his own. This business he gave up about 1767 in order to devote himself to the construction of the spinning frame. The spinning jenny, which was patented by James Hargreaves (d. 1778), a carpenter of Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1770, though he had invented it some years earlier, gave the means of spinning twenty or thirty threads at once with no more labour than had previously been required to spin a single thread. The thread spun by the jenny could not, however, be used except as weft, being destitute of the firmness or hardness required in the longitudinal threads or warp. 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.
The precise date of the invention is not known; but in 1767 he employed John Kay, a watchmaker at Warrington, to assist him in the preparation of the parts of his machine, and he took out a patent for it in 1769. The first model was set up in the parlour of the house belonging to the free grammar school at Preston. This invention having been brought to a fairly advanced stage, he removed to Nottingham in 1768, accompanied by Kay and John Smalley of Preston, and there erected his first spinning mill, which was worked by horses. But his operations were at first greatly fettered by want of capital, until Jedediah Strutt (q.v.), having satisfied himself of the value of the machines, entered with his partner, Samuel Need, into partnership with him, and enabled him in 1771 to build a second factory, on a much larger scale, at Cromford in Derbyshire, the machinery of which was turned by a water-wheel. A fresh patent, taken out in 1775, covered several additional improvements in the processes of carding, roving and spinning. As the value of his processes became known, he began to be troubled with infringements of his patents, and in 1781 he took action in the courts to vindicate his rights. In the first case, against Colonel Mordaunt, who was supported by a combination of manufacturers, the decision was unfavourable to him, on the sole ground that the description of the machinery in the specification was obscure and indistinct. In consequence he prepared a “case,” which he at one time intended to lay before parliament, as the foundation of an application for an act for relief. But this intention was subsequently abandoned; and in a new trial (Arkwright v. Nightingale) in February 1785, the presiding judge having expressed himself favourably with respect to the sufficiency of the specification, a verdict was given for Arkwright. On this, as on the former trial, nothing was stated against the originality of the invention.
In consequence of these conflicting verdicts, the whole matter was brought, by a writ of scire facias, before the court of King’s Bench, to have the validity of the patent finally settled, and it was not till this third trial, which took place in June 1785, that Arkwright’s claim to the inventions which formed the subject of the patent was disputed. To support this new allegation, Arkwright’s opponents brought forward, for the first time, Thomas Highs, or Hayes, a reed-maker at Bolton, who stated that he had invented a machine for spinning by rollers previously to 1768, and that he had employed the watchmaker Kay to make a model of that machine. Kay himself was produced to prove that he had communicated that model to Arkwright, and that this was the real source of all his pretended inventions. Having no idea that any attempt was to be made to overturn the patent on this new ground, Arkwright’s counsel were not prepared with evidence to repel this statement, and the verdict went against him. On a motion for a new trial on the 10th of November of the same year it was stated that he was furnished with affidavits contradicting the evidence that had been given by Kay and others with respect to the originality of the invention; but the court refused to grant a new trial, on the ground that, whatever might be the fact as to the question of originality, the deficiency in the specification was enough to sustain the verdict, and the cancellation of the patents was ordered a few days afterwards. His fortunes, however, were not thereby seriously affected, for by this time his business capacity and organizing skill had enabled him to consolidate his position, in spite of the difficulties he had encountered not only from rival manufacturers but also from the working classes, who in 1779 displayed their antipathy to labour-saving appliances by destroying a large mill he had erected near Chorley.
Though a man of great personal strength, Arkwright never enjoyed good health, and throughout his career of invention and discovery he laboured under a severe asthmatic affection. A complication of disorders at length terminated his life on the 3rd of August 1792, at his works at Cromford. He was knighted in 1786 when he presented a congratulatory address from the wapentake of Wirksworth to George III., on his escape from the attempt on his life by Margaret Nicholson.
ARLES, a town of south-eastern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Bouches-du-Rhône, 54 m. N.W. of Marseilles by rail. Pop. (1906) 16,191. A canal unites Arles with the harbour of Bouc on the Mediterranean. Arles stands on the left bank of the Rhone, just below the point at which the river divides to form its delta. A tubular bridge unites it with the suburb of Trinquetaille on the opposite bank. The town is hemmed in on the east by the railway line from Lyons to Marseilles, on the south by the Canal de Craponne. Its streets are narrow and irregular, and, away from the promenades which border it on the south, there is little animation. In the centre of the town stand the Place de la République, a spacious square overlooked by the hôtel de ville, the museum, and the old cathedral of St Trophime, the finest Romanesque church in Provence. Founded in the 7th century, St Trophime has been several times rebuilt, and was restored in 1870. Its chief portal, which dates from the 12th century, is a masterpiece of graceful arrangement and rich carving. The interior, plain in itself, contains interesting sculpture. The choir opens into a beautiful cloister, the massive vaulting of which is supported on heavy piers adorned with statuary, between which intervene slender columns arranged in pairs and surmounted by delicately carved capitals. Two of the galleries are Romanesque, while two are Gothic. Arles has two other churches of the Romanesque period, and others of later date. The hôtel de ville, a building of the 17th century, contains the library. Its clock tower, surmounted by a statue of Mars, dates from the previous century. The museum, occupying an old Gothic church, is particularly rich in Roman remains and in early Christian sarcophagi; there is also a museum of Provençal curiosities. The tribunal of commerce and the communal college are the chief public institutions. Arles is not a busy town and its port is of little importance. There are, however, flour mills, oil and soap works, and the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée Railway Company have large workshops. Sheep-breeding is a considerable industry in the vicinity. The women of Arles have long enjoyed a reputation for marked beauty, but the distinctive type is fast disappearing owing to their intermarriage with strangers who have immigrated to the town.
Arles still possesses many monuments of Roman architecture and art, the most remarkable being the ruins of an amphitheatre (the Arénes), capable of containing 25,000 spectators, which, in the 11th and 12th centuries, was flanked with massive towers, of which three are still standing. There are also a theatre, in which, besides the famous Venus of Arles, discovered in 1651, many other remains have been found; an ancient obelisk of a single block, 47 ft. high, standing since 1676 in the Place de la République; the ruins of the palace of Constantine, the forum, the thermae and the remains of the Roman ramparts and of aqueducts. There is, besides, a Roman cemetery known as the Aliscamps (Elysii Campi), consisting of a short avenue once bordered by tombs, of which a few still remain.
The ancient town, Arelate, was an important place at the time of the invasion of Julius Caesar, who made it a settlement for his veterans. It was pillaged in A.D. 270, but restored and embellished by Constantine, who made it his principal residence, and founded what is now the suburb of Trinquetaille. Under Honorius, it became the seat of the prefecture of the Gauls and one of the foremost cities in the western empire. Its bishopric founded by St Trophimus in the 1st century, was in the 5th century the primatial see of Gaul; it was suppressed in 1790. After the fall of the Roman empire the city passed into the power of the Visigoths, and rapidly declined. It was plundered in 730 by the Saracens, but in the 10th century became the capital of the kingdom of Arles (see below). In the 12th century it was a free city, governed by a podesta and consuls after the model of the Italian republics, which it also emulated in commerce and navigation. In 1251 it submitted to Charles I. of Anjou, and from that time onwards followed the fortunes of Provence. A number of ecclesiastical synods have been held at Arles, as in 314 (see below), 354, 452 and 475.
See V. Clair, Monuments d’Arles (1837); J.J. Estrangin, Description de la ville d’Arles (1845); F. Beissier, Le Pays d’Arles (1889); Roger Peyre, Nîmes, Arles, Orange (1903).
(R. Tr.)