Somewhere about the year 1752, any one passing along a certain obscure
alley in Preston, then a mere village compared with the prosperous town
into which it has since expanded, might have observed projecting from
the entrance to the underground flat of one of the houses, a blue and
white pole, with a battered tin plate dangling at the end of it, the
object of which was to indicate that if he wanted his hair cut or his
chin shaved, he had only to step down stairs, and the owner of the sign
would be delighted to accommodate him. But either people in that quarter
had little or no superfluous hair to get rid of, or they had it taken
off elsewhere; for Dicky Arkwright, the barber in the cellar, for whom
the pole and plate stood sponsor in the upper world, had few
opportunities of displaying his talents, and spent most of his time
whetting his razors on a long piece of leather, one end of which was
nailed to the wall, while the other was drawn towards him, and keeping
the hot water and the soap ready for the customers who seldom or never
came. This sort of thing did not suit Dick's notions at all; for he was
of an active temperament, and besides feeling very dull at being so much
by himself all day, he pulled rather a long face when he counted out the
scanty array of coppers in the till after shutting up shop for the
night. As he sat one night, before tumbling into his truckle bed that
stood in a recess in one corner of the dingy little room, meditating on
the hardness of the times, a bright idea struck him; and the next
morning the attractions of the sign-pole were enhanced by a staring
placard, bearing the urgent invitation:--
COME TO THE
SUBTERRANEOUS BARBER!
HE SHAVES FOR A PENNY!!
Now twopence, as we believe all those who have investigated the subject
are agreed, was the standard charge for a clean shave at that period;
and as soon as this innovation got wind, we can fancy how indignant the
fraternity were at the unprincipled conduct of one of their number; how
they denounced the reprobate, and prophesied his speedy ruin, over their
pipes and beer in the parlour of the "Duke of Marlborough," which they
patronized out of respect for that hero's enormous periwig,--in their
eyes his chief title to immortality, and a bright example for the
degenerate age, when people had not only taken to wearing their own
hair, but were even beginning to leave off dusting it with flour! And to
make matters worse, here was a low fellow offering to shave for a penny.
A number of people, tickled with the originality of the placard, and not
unmindful of the penny saved, began to patronize the "Subterraneous
barber," and he soon drew so many customers away from the higher-priced
shops, that they were obliged to come down, after a while, to a penny as
well. Not to be outdone, Arkwright lowered his charge to a halfpenny,
and still retained his rank as the cheapest barber in the place.
Arkwright's parents had been very poor people; and as he was the
youngest of a family of thirteen, it may be readily supposed that all
the school learning he got was of the most meagre kind,--if, indeed, he
ever was at school at all, which is very doubtful. He was of a very
ardent, enterprising temperament, however, and when once he took a thing
in hand, stubbornly persevered in carrying it through to the end. About
the year 1760, being then about thirty years of age, Arkwright got tired
of the shaving, which brought him but a very scanty and precarious
livelihood, and resolved to try his luck in a business where there was
more scope for his enterprise and activity. He therefore began business
as an itinerant dealer in hair, travelling up and down the country to
collect it, dressing it himself, and then disposing of it in a prepared
state to the wig-makers. As he was very quick in detecting any
improvements that might be made in the process of dressing, he soon
acquired the reputation amongst the wig-makers of supplying a better
article than any of his rivals, and drove a very good trade. He had also
picked up or discovered for himself the secret of dyeing the hair in a
particular way, by which he not only augmented his profits, but enlarged
the circle of his customers. He throve so well, that he was able to lay
by a little money and to marry. He was very fond of spending what
leisure time he had in making experiments in mechanics; and for a while
was very much taken up with an attempt to solve the attractive problem
of perpetual motion. No doubt he soon saw the hopelessness of the
effort; but although he left the question unsolved, the bent thus given
to his thoughts was fruitful of most valuable consequences.
Living in the midst of a manufacturing population, Arkwright was
accustomed to hear daily complaints of the continual difficulty of
procuring sufficient weft to keep the looms employed; while the
exportation of cotton goods gave rise to a growing demand for the
manufactured article. The weavers generally had the weft they used spun
for them by their wives or daughters; and those whose families could not
supply the necessary quantity, had their spinning done by their
neighbours; and even by paying, as they had to do, more for the spinning
than the price allowed by their masters, very few could procure weft
enough to keep themselves constantly at work. It was no uncommon thing,
we learn, for a weaver to walk three or four miles in a morning, and
call on five or six spinners, before he could collect weft to serve him
for the rest of the day. Arkwright must have been constantly hearing of
this difficulty, and of the restrictions it placed on the manufacture of
cotton goods; and being a mechanical genius, was led to think how it
might be lessened, if not got rid of altogether. The idea of having an
automaton spinner, instead of one of flesh and blood, had occurred
before then to more than one speculator; but the thing had never
answered, and no models or descriptions of the machines proposed were
preserved. One inventor had, indeed, destroyed his own machine, after
having constructed it and found it to work, for fear that if it came
into use it would deprive the poor spinners of their livelihood,--in
reality its effect would have been to provide employment and food for
thousands more than at that time got a miserable living from their
spinning-wheels.
While Arkwright was intent on the discovery of perpetual motion, he fell
in with a clockmaker of the name of Kay, who assisted him in making
wheels and springs for the contrivance he was trying to complete. This
led to an intimate connection between them; and when Arkwright had given
up the perpetual motion affair, and applied his thoughts to the
invention of some machine for producing cotton weft more rapidly than by
the simple wheel, Kay continued to help him in making models. Arkwright
soon became so engrossed in his new task, and so confident of ultimate
success, that he began to neglect his regular business. All his
thoughts, and nearly all his time, were given up to the great work he
had taken in hand. His trade fell off; he spent all his savings in
purchasing materials for models, and getting them put together, and he
fell into very distressed circumstances. His wife remonstrated with him,
but in vain; and one day, in a rage at what she considered the cause of
all their privations, she smashed some of his models on the floor. Such
an outrage was more than Arkwright could bear, and they separated.
In 1768, Arkwright, having completed the model of a machine for spinning
cotton thread, removed to Preston, taking Kay with him. At this time he
had hardly a penny in the world, and was almost in rags. His poverty,
indeed, was such, that soon after his arrival in Preston, a contested
election for a member of Parliament having taken place, he was so
tattered and miserable in his appearance, that the party with whom he
voted had to give him a decent suit of clothes before he could be seen
at the polling-booth. He had got leave to set up his machine in the
dwelling-house attached to the Free Grammar School; but, afraid of
suffering from the hostility of the spinners, as the unfortunate
Hargreaves had done some time before, he and Kay thought it best to
leave Lancashire, and try their fortune in Nottingham.
Poor and friendless, it may easily be supposed that Arkwright found it a
hard matter to get any one to back him in a speculation which people
then regarded as hazardous, if not illusory. He got a few pounds from
one of the bankers in the town; but that was soon spent, and further
advances were refused. Nothing daunted, Arkwright tried elsewhere for
help, and at length succeeded in convincing Messrs. Need and Strutt,[A]
large stocking-weavers in the place, of the value of his invention, and
inducing them to enter into partnership with him. In 1769 he took out a
patent for the machine, as its inventor, and a mill, worked by
horse-power, was erected for spinning cotton by the new machine. Two
years after, he and his partner set up another mill in Derbyshire,
worked by a water-wheel; and in 1775 he took out another patent for some
improvements on his original scheme.
The machinery which he patented consisted of a number of different
contrivances; but the chief of these, and the one which he particularly
claimed entirely as his own invention (for he frankly admitted that some
of the other parts were only developments of other inventors), was what
is called the water-frame throstle for drawing out the cotton from a
coarse to a finer and harder twisted thread, and so rendering it fit to
be used for the warp, or longitudinal threads of the cloth, which were
formed of linen, as well as the weft. This apparatus was a combination
of the carding and spinning machinery; and the principle of having two
pairs of rollers, one revolving faster than the other, was now for the
first time applied to machinery.
In a year or two the success of Arkwright's inventions was fairly
established. The manufacturers were fully alive to its importance; and
Arkwright now reaped the reward of all the toil and danger he had
undergone in the shape of a diligent and persistent attempt to rob him
of his monopoly, which was carried on for a number of years, and was at
length successful. Some of the manufacturers, who were greedy to profit
by the new machinery without paying the inventor, got hold of Kay, who
had quarrelled with Arkwright some time before, and found him a willing
instrument in their hands. It would take too long to go over all the law
processes which Arkwright had now to engage in to defend his rights. Kay
got up a story that the real inventor was a poor reed maker named Highs,
who had once employed him to make a model, the secret of which he had
imparted to Arkwright; and this was a capital excuse for using the new
machinery in defiance of the patent, although the evidence at the
various trials is now held completely to vindicate Arkwright's title as
inventor. One law plea was lost to him, on account of some technical
omission in the specifications; another restored to him the enjoyment of
his monopoly; and a third trial destroyed the patent, which Arkwright
never took any steps to recover.
Besides trying to defraud Arkwright of his patent-rights, the rival
manufacturers, with jealous inconsistency, did their best to
discountenance the use of the yarns he made, although much superior in
quality to what was then in use. But Arkwright not only surmounted this
obstacle, but turned it to good account, for it set him to manufacturing
the yarn into stockings and calicoes, the duty on which being soon
after lowered, in spite of the strenuous opposition of the
manufacturers, turned out a very profitable speculation.
For the first five years Arkwright's mills yielded little or no profit;
but after that, the adverse tide against which he had struggled so
bravely changed, and he followed a prosperous and honourable career till
his death, which happened in 1792. He was knighted, not for being, as he
was, a benefactor to his country, but because, in his capacity of high
sheriff, he chanced to read some trumpery address to the king. He left
behind a fortune of about half a million sterling.