Arkwright

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

SIR RICHARD, an English inventor, born at Preston, in Lancashire, in 1732. The youngest of 13 children, he was bred to the trade of a barber. When about 35 years of age he gave himself up exclusively to the subject of inventions for spinning cotton. The thread spun by Hargreaves' jenny could not be used except as weft, being destitute of the firmness or hardness required in the longitudinal threads or warp. But 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, leaving the operator merely to feed the machine with the cotton and to join the threads when they happen to break. His invention introduced the system of spinning by rollers, the carding, or roving, as it is technically termed (that is, the soft, loose strip of cotton), passing through one pair of rollers, and being received by a second pair, which are made to revolve with (as the case may be) three, four, or five times the velocity of the first pair. By this contrivance the roving is drawn out into a thread of the desired degree of tenuity and hardness. Having taken as partners two men of means, Arkwright erected his first mill at Nottingham and took out a patent for spinning by rollers in 1769. As the mode of working the machinery by horse power was found too expensive, he built a second factory on a much larger scale at Cromford, in Derbyshire, in 1771, the machinery of which was turned by a water-wheel. Having made several additional discoveries and improvements, he took out a fresh patent for the whole in 1775, and thus completed a series of the most ingenious and complicated machinery. Notwithstanding a series of lawsuits in defense of his patent rights, and the destruction of his property by mobs, he amassed a large fortune. He was knighted by George III., in 1786, and died in 1792.