Crompton, Samuel
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Samuel (1753-1827), an English spinner and weaver; the inventor of the spinning-mule. Crompton was born at Firewood, near Bolton, Lancashire. His parents were poor and, like other farmers in that vicinity, eked out a scanty living by spinning and weaving. The father died while the children were still young. His widow struggled hard to educate her children, and young Crompton put forth every effort to obtain a mathematical education. Finding himself hindered in weaving by the difficulty of getting suitable yarn, he set to work to invent some machine by which better yarn could be spun and greater quantities produced than by the Hargreaves jenny. For five years Crompton labored, almost literally night and day, and spent every cent he could spare to carry out his project. The machine which he finally constructed produced such fine yarn that his house was beset by people wishing to discover his secret. It is said that ladders were placed against his windows in the effort to obtain a sight of his machine. Crompton could not afford to take out a patent. At last, under the written promise of a liberal subscription, he disclosed his invention to certain manufacturers. He received in return less than $300. He set to work bravely, however, to build up a manufacturing business. Years afterwards, near the close of a toilsome life, he received from Parliament a reward of $25,000 which was entirely inadequate to the needs of his manufactory. The importance of Crompton's invention cannot be overestimated. The Hargreaves jenny and the Arkwright roller frame made possible the Crompton spinning-mule, but it at once superseded the earlier machines. Thirty years after Crompton brought out his machine there were twelve times as many in use as there were Arkwright frames, while the Hargreaves jenny was left still farther in the rear. See Spinning ; Hargreaves ; Arkwright
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The biography stands: Crompton was born in 1753 at Firwood Fold (Hall i' th' Wood, the house where he built the mule around 1779, is spelled "Firewood" here), sold his secret for a pittance, and was voted £5,000 by Parliament in 1812 — the $25,000 Aiton's mentions. What has changed is the machine's fate. Aiton's wrote in 1910 that the mule's importance "cannot be overestimated," and it was then still the heart of Lancashire fine-cotton spinning; but Richard Roberts's self-acting mule had already automated Crompton's hand-drawn carriage in the 1820s, and during the twentieth century ring spinning — and later open-end rotor spinning — drove the mule out of commercial use altogether, with British mule spinning ending in the second half of the century and the bulk of the world's yarn now spun in Asia. Crompton is remembered less as a working engineer's model than as the classic case of an inventor who got nothing: his Bolton house is a museum and he has a statue in the town.
Written for this edition, 2026.