On the 3d of May 1734, there was a hanging at Cork which made a good
deal more noise than such a very ordinary event generally did in those
days. There was nothing remarkable about the malefactor, or the crime he
had committed. He was a very commonplace ruffian, and had earned his
elevation to the gallows by a vulgar felony. What was remarkable about
the affair was, that the woollen weavers of Cork, being then in a state
of great distress from want of work, dressed up the convict in cotton
garments, and that the poor wretch, having once been a weaver himself,
"employed" the last occasion he was ever to have of addressing his
fellow creatures, by assuring them that all his misdeeds and misfortunes
were to be traced to the "pernicious practice of wearing cottons."
"Therefore, good Christians," he continued, "consider that if you go on
to suppress your own goods, by wearing such cottons as I am now clothed
in, you will bring your country into misery, which will consequently
swarm with such unhappy malefactors as your present Object is; and the
blood of every miserable felon that will hang after this warning from
the gallows will lie at your doors."
All which sayings were no doubt greatly applauded by the disheartened
weavers on the spot, and much taken to heart by the citizens and gentry
to whom they were addressed.
This is only one out of the many illustrations which might be drawn from
the chronicles of those days, of the prejudice and discouragement cotton
had to contend against on its first appearance in this country.
Prohibited over and over again, laid under penalties and high duties,
treated with every sort of contumely and oppression, it had long to
struggle desperately for the barest tolerance; yet it ended by
overcoming all obstacles, and distancing its favoured rival wool.
Returning good for evil, cotton now sustains one-sixth of our
fellow-countrymen, and is an important mainstay of our commerce and
manufactures.
First imported into Great Britain towards the middle of the seventeenth
century, cotton was but little used for purposes of manufacture till the
middle of the eighteenth. The settlement of some Flemish emigrants in
Lancashire led to that district becoming the principal seat of the
cotton manufacture; and probably the ungenerous nature of its soil
induced the people to resort to spinning and weaving to make up for the
unprofitableness of their agricultural labours.
A nobler monument of human skill, enterprise, and perseverance, than the
invention of cotton-spinning machinery is hardly to be met with; but it
must also be owned that its history, encouraging as it is in one aspect,
is in another sad and humiliating to the last degree. It is difficult at
first to credit the uniform ingratitude and treachery which the various
inventors met with from the very men whom their contrivances enriched.
"There is nothing," said James Watt in the crisis of his fortunes, worn
with care, and sick with hope deferred--"there is nothing so foolish as
inventing;" and with far more reason the inventors of cotton-spinning
machines could echo the mournful cry. It is sad to think that so proud a
chapter of our history should bear so dark a stain.
In 1733 the primitive method still prevailed of spinning between the
finger and thumb, only one thread at a time; and weaving up the yarn in
a loom, the shuttle of which had to be thrown from right to left and
left to right by both hands alternately. In that year, however, the
first step was made in advance, by the invention of the fly-shuttle,
which, by means of a handle and spring, could be jerked from side to
side with one hand. This contrivance was due to the ingenuity of John
Kay, a loom-maker at Colchester, and proved his ruin. The weavers did
their best to prevent the use of the shuttle,--the masters to get it
used, and to cheat the inventor out of his reward. Poor Kay was soon
brought low in the world by costly law-suits, and being not yet tired of
inventing, devised a rude power-loom. In revenge a mob of weavers broke
into his house, smashed all his machines, and would have smashed him
too, had they laid hands on him. He escaped from their clutches, to find
his way to Paris, and to die there in misery not long afterwards. Kay
was the first of the martyrs in this branch of invention. James
Hargreaves was the next.
The use of the fly-shuttle greatly expedited the process of weaving, and
the spinning of cotton soon fell behind. The weavers were often brought
to a stand-still for want of weft to go on with, and had to spend their
mornings going about in search of it, sometimes without getting as much
as kept them busy for the rest of the day. The scarcity of yarn was a
constant complaint; and many a busy brain was at work trying to devise
some improvement on the common hand-wheel. Amongst others, James
Hargreaves, an ingenious weaver at Standhill, near Blackburn, who had
already improved the mode of cleaning and unravelling the cotton before
spinning, took the subject into consideration. One day, when brooding
over it in his cottage, idle for want of weft, the accidental
overturning of his wife's wheel suggested to him the principle of the
spinning-jenny. Lying on its side, the wheel still continued in
motion--the spindle being thrown from a horizontal into an upright
position; and it occurred to him that all he had got to do was to place
a number of spindles side by side. This was in 1764, and three years
afterwards Hargreaves had worked out the idea, and constructed a
spinning frame, with eight spindles and a horizontal wheel, which he
christened after his wife Jenny, whose wheel had first put him in the
right track. Directly the spinners of the locality got knowledge of this
machine that was to do eight times as much as any one of them, they
broke into the inventor's cottage, destroyed the jenny, and compelled
him to fly for the safety of his life to Nottingham. He took out a
patent, but the manufacturers leagued themselves against them. Sole,
friendless, penniless, he could make no head against their numbers and
influence, relinquished his invention, and died in obscurity and
distress ten years after he had the misfortune to contrive the
spinning-jenny.
The history of the cotton manufacture now becomes identified with the
lives of Arkwright, Crompton, and Cartwright--the inventors of the
water-frame, the mule, and the power-loom.