The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  Success can cement the relations between partners; such was the story of Matthew Boulton and James Watt. It can also corrode them. In 1775, the partnership of Arkwright, Strutt, and Need was showing some signs of rot. That was the year that Arkwright applied for, and received, an entirely new series of patents for machines that could, sequentially, card and comb raw cotton, draw it into thread, and twist it into yarn, intended to centralize every aspect of the manufacturing process. Significantly, the 1775 patents were in Arkwright’s name only, unlike the original 1769 water frame patent, which included the two partners (though not Kay, who had been formally apprenticed to Arkwright and subsequently left after much conflict with his master). The partnership did not survive, though both Strutt and Need were well compensated for their few years’ investment when Arkwright bought out their shares in the Cromford mill.

  In 1774, another Lancashire inventor, Samuel Crompton, had produced the first machine to integrate a spindle carriage with a weaving frame, and could thus take raw material in one end and produce cloth at the other. But Crompton, either out of perversity or lack of ambition, never patented his invention, apparently being more interested in the writings of the Swedish scientist, inventor, and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. As a result, though Richard Arkwright paid a small fee to see the machine demonstrated in 1780, he had no obligation to pay subsequent royalties to its inventor, and almost immediately he incorporated Crompton’s invention—the first “mule,” so called because of its mixed parentage—into his factories, of which the most spectacular was Masson Mills.

  If the Derwent River mills weren’t already, Crompton’s mule made them the most productive, if not the most enlightened, in the world, running two twelve-hour shifts daily. The machines still required adult strength and skill to operate, but numerous tasks, including gleaning the unused cotton, gave employment (if that is the right word) to hundreds of children as young as six. When the brilliant engineer and indefatigable improver John Smeaton demonstrated that breastshot waterwheels, which caught the flow of water as it fell from a millrace, were more efficient than the undershot wheels that were turned only by a river’s current, Arkwright changed his power source within months.

  He was, partly because of his success with waterpower,35 suspicious of steam, about which he displayed an atypical indecisiveness, inquiring about a Boulton & Watt engine as early as 1777 but waiting until 1790 to order one. While he preferred waterpower, he was scarcely dogmatic about it; his Nottingham factory continued to use horse-powered wheels long after he shifted to water, partly as an experiment in calculating his power needs; he could scarcely add to or subtract36 from a river’s flow in the same way that he could add or subtract horses on their wheel. Horse power, in addition (and again unlike waterpower), was scalable: As a factory grew, it was easier to augment horse power than waterpower.

  By the 1780s, however, Arkwright finally caught an enthusiasm for returning engines, the kind that use steam pumps to transport water to a higher elevation, which allowed gravity flow to operate a waterwheel. In 1781, Smeaton evaluated the potential of mills worked by steam directly versus those mediated by water and wrote that “no motion can ever act perfectly steady37 and equal in producing a circular motion, like the regular efflux of water turning in a waterwheel.” Arkwright took him at his word. He built the Shudehill mill, in Manchester, which used two Newcomen-type steam engines, consuming five tons of coal daily, to pump water to a reservoir from which it could drive a waterwheel thirty feet in diameter and eight feet wide, recycling the water all day long; the “earliest steam-powered cotton spinning mill38 was driven by the earliest successful type of steam engine.”

  By the time he built Shudehill, Richard Arkwright employed at least five thousand people and his estimated net worth was somewhere north of £200,000.39 That was also the year in which he decided to take his winning streak to court, filing suit to protect his rights in the underlying 1769 patent, which was due to expire in 1783, along with his royalties on the fundamental machine used in cotton spinning. Arkwright had consistently set those royalties very high, partly to protect his own manufacturing businesses, and as a result had no shortage of infringers; in 1781, Arkwright sued nine of them, and the court found for him eight times. Unsatisfied, he kept up the pressure for another four years, even after the expiration of his first and most important patent.

  In February 1785, Arkwright filed suit against his Derbyshire neighbor “Mad Peter” Nightingale* to finally recover the carding portion of his 1775 patent, and although he secured a finding of infringement, Arkwright had finally overreached. In May 1785, the Crown, under pressure from Arkwright’s competitors, filed a writ of scire facias, using an archaic legal doctrine that required a sheriff to notify a party that his right was questioned and had to be defended. By placing the burden of proof on Arkwright rather than his accusers, his competitors in the cotton industry, who had invested hundreds of thousands of pounds in machinery that they understandably wanted to be able to use without permission from Arkwright, had stumbled on a powerful weapon.

  The trial of Rex v. Arkwright, which was heard at Westminster Hall in June 1785, was the result. The original dubiousness of Arkwright’s “invention” now came back to haunt him, as Highs and Kay, and even James Hargreaves’s widow, all appeared as witnesses against him, with Kay going on record as saying “he never would have had the rollers but through me.” Arkwright, during his own testimony, said, “if any man has found out a thing,40 and begun a thing, and does not go forwards … another man has the right to take it up, and get a patent for it.”

  The final ruling, by Chief Justice Buller, found against Arkwright on three separate grounds: that the 1775 patent was not novel (that it essentially restated the 1769 patent, in an attempt to extend it); that it included elements not invented by Arkwright; and that it was insufficiently specific. On November 14, 1785, the Court of King’s Bench vacated four of Arkwright’s patents.

  He was enraged, but hardly impoverished, by the ruling. The real impact, however, was the unique public forum it offered Britain on the subject of patent, invention, and the new world that they had created. Though the public attacks on Arkwright’s behavior were vicious (as were the courtroom tactics: King’s Counsel Edward Bearcroft pointed to Arkwright and declared, “There sits the thief!”41), the actual decision against him was based on the technical grounds that his original specification was too vague. Though the last piece of the decision was the least newsworthy—the broadsheet distributed immediately after the trial, which crowed that “the old Fox is at last caught42 by his own beard in his own trap,” made no mention of it—it was by far the most significant.

  By failing to describe the invention adequately, Arkwright’s patent application had, in essence, broken the bargain that granted patents to inventors in return for their making public the useful knowledge inherent in them. This part of the ruling would draw the attention of a number of other inventors, including James Watt.

  Watt had been drawn into the Arkwright litigation in January 1785, at the behest of Boulton, who received a letter from Erasmus Darwin that said in part, “If yourself or Mr. Watt think as I do43 on this affair, & that your own interest, pray give me a line that I may advise Mr. Arkwright to apply to you.” Watt replied, “Though I do not love Arkwright,44 I don’t like the precedent of setting aside patents through default of specification. I fear for our own. The specification is not perfect according to the rules lately laid down by the judges. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that we [Boulton & Watt] have hid our candle under a bushel. We have taught all men to erect our engines, and are likely to suffer for our pains…. I begin to have little faith in patents; for according to the enterprising genius of the present age, no man can have a profitable patent but it will be pecked at….”

  Watt did more than simply offer testimony in the Nightingale trial. After the final decision in November 1785, Josiah Wedgwood, like Watt and Boulton a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and himself a succes
sful industrialist, wrote to Watt, “I have visited Mr. Arkwright45 several times and find him much more conversible than I expected…. I told him you were considering the subject of patents, and you two geniuses may probably strike out some new lights together which neither of you might think of separately.” Wedgwood proved prescient; together, Watt and Arkwright wrote a manuscript entitled “Heads of a Bill to explain and amend the laws relative to Letters Patent and grants of privileges for new Inventions,” essentially a reworking of Coke’s Statute of 1623 that had created England’s first patent law. In addition to its policy prescriptions, which were largely an unsuccessful argument against the requirement that patent applications be as specific as possible, the manuscript offered a remarkable insight into Watt’s perspective on the life of the inventor, who should, in Watt’s own (perhaps inadvertently revealing) words, “be considered an Infant, who cannot guard his own Rights”:

  An engineer’s life without patent46 is not worthwhile … few men of ingenuity make fortunes … without suffering to think seriously whether the article he manufactures might, or might not, be Improved. The man of ingenuity in order to succeed … must seclude himself from Society, he must devote the whole powers of his mind to that one object, he must persevere in spite of the many fruitless experiments he makes, and he must apply money to the expenses of these experiments, which strict Prudence would dedicate to other purposes. By seclusion from the world he becomes ignorant of its manners, and unable to grapple with the more artful tradesman, who has applied the powers of his mind, not to the improvement of the commodity he deals in, but to the means of buying cheap and selling dear, or to the still less laudable purpose of oppressing such ingenious workmen as their ill fate may have thrown into his power.

  At no earlier time or other place in human history could Watt’s argument—“patents create a great and profitable trade … to the immense emolument of the state,” which should therefore grant patents “not as the price of a secret,47 but as rewards to men of merit for their ingenuity”—have even been comprehensible.* Combining Locke’s seventeenth-century doctrine of natural rights in one’s intellectual labor with eighteenth-century utilitarianism, it was, literally, revolutionary.

  Arkwright died a wealthy man in 1792; within a few decades, biographers would describe him as a fraud who had, in one biographer’s words, “possessed unwearied zeal49 and patience in obtaining the discoveries of others.” A few years later, others would defend him; one described him as “a man of Napoleonic nerve and ambition.” By the 1840s, the retrospectively apparent fact that Arkwright, and men like him, had made Britain a world-straddling power pretty much guaranteed a measure of florid, if backhanded, hero worship. The greatest hero-worshipper of them all, Thomas Carlyle, described Arkwright as

  A plain, almost gross,50 bag-cheeked, potbellied, much enduring, much inventing man and barber…. French Revolutions were a-brewing: to resist the same in any measure, imperial Kaisers were impotent without the cotton and cloth of England, and it was this man that had to give England the power of cotton…. It is said ideas produce revolutions, and truly they do; not spiritual ideas only, but even mechanical. In this clanging clashing universal Sword-dance which the European world now dances for the last half-century, Voltaire is but one choragus [leader of a movement, from the old Greek word for the sponsor of a chorus] where Richard Arkwright is another.

  This touches on, but misses, the importance of the part played by Arkwright in the birth of self-sustaining industrialization. Sooner or later, the cycle of innovation needed to provide goods not merely for Britain’s manufacturers and traders—what a modern analysis would call business-to-business commerce—but the nation’s consumers. The typical eighteenth-century British household could scarcely buy cannon, or wooden pulley blocks for sailing ships, or—except for home heating—even much coal. But they could, and did, buy clothes. Arkwright was not a great inventor, but he was a visionary, who saw, better than any man alive, how to convert useful knowledge into cotton apparel and ultimately into wealth: for himself, and for Britain.

  IN ADDITION TO MAKING cloth and inspiring innovation, textile manufacturing produced conflict. More than the mining of coal, or the making of iron, or even the grinding of grain, it exposed the great social clash of the day: on the one hand, the power of sustained innovation, fueled by ever-increasing wealth; on the other, five centuries of traditional expertise controlled by militant and well-organized artisans. None of them were more militant, or better organized, than Britain’s spinners and weavers.

  Spinning first. The art of spinning is largely a matter of coordinating several processes simultaneously so that the fiber is under constant tension. Since it is elastic, the amount of tension applied to it while it is wound can result in yarn that is inconsistent in quality from one end to the other. In the first spinning machines, the operator had to simultaneously shape the winding and turn the spindles at precisely the same rate, so as to wind up the yarn—the term of art is “winding the cop”—without either stretching the yarn or allowing it to go slack. The craft was difficult enough that spinners became not only indispensable to the process, but highly protective of their place in it, exhibiting all the rent-seeking mania of a medieval guild. Along the way they transformed themselves from independent contractors into the nation’s most powerful and highly organized craft union. At one union meeting, a spinner argued violently against allowing “piecers” (the subordinates on the spinning line, who tie together threads when they break) to actually put up a cop of cotton yarn unless he was “a son, brother, or orphan nephew.”51 In the industry’s Lancashire heartland,52 mule spinners developed work rules in 1780 that remained in force until the 1960s, and partly in consequence, the new and improved ring-spinning machines, invented by the American John Thorp in 1828, which operated continuously and twisted fibers into yarn by attaching them to a rotating ring, didn’t catch on in Britain53 until the end of the nineteenth century.

  As with spinning, so with weaving. Edmund Cartwright, a onetime Church of England minister and “the last of the great inventors54 who belong to the craft period,” built the first power loom in 1785, inspired by the need to keep up with the great surpluses of yarn being produced by Arkwright’s factories.* As Cartwright later recalled,

  as soon as Arkwright’s patent expired,55 so many mills would be erected and so much cotton spun that hands would never be found to weave it…. It struck me that as plain weaving can only be three movements which were to follow each other in succession, there would be little difficulty in producing them and repeating them. Full of these ideas I immediately employed a carpenter and smith to carry them into effect. As soon as the machine was finished, I got a weaver to put in a warp which was of such material as sail cloths are usually made of. To my great delight, a piece of cloth, such as it was, was the product.

  Cartwright’s initial design, for which he received a patent in 1785, was ingenious, but not yet practical, because it failed to solve the feedback problem inherent in the nature of mechanizing the shuttle, which was, in the language of engineering, “negatively driven.” That is, it was driven first one way, then the other, which meant that it could not be allowed to rebound and so slacken the weave. The task of maintaining the constant tension needed to keep each thread of the warp the same length was hugely difficult to mechanize, which was why weaving remained a handcraft longer than any other step in textile manufacturing. Among other things, Cartwright needed some way to control variations in speed, since a too-slow shuttle wouldn’t travel the entire width of the loom, and a too-fast one would bounce back, with disastrous results.

  It took two years, and three more patents, before the Reverend Cartwright’s loom was ready for commercial application, but in April 1787, the new and improved version, with its frame now horizontal rather than vertical, and with each warp thread attached to a separate bobbin, was complete.

  Cartwright constructed twenty looms using his design and put them to work in a weaving “shed” i
n Doncaster. He further agreed to license the design to a cotton manufacturer named Robert Grimshaw, who started building five hundred Cartwright looms at a new mill in Manchester in the spring of 1792. By summertime, only a few dozen had been built and installed, but that was enough to provoke Manchester’s weavers, who accurately saw the threat they represented. Whether their anger flamed hot enough to burn down Grimshaw’s mill remains unknown, but something certainly did: In March 1792, after a series of anonymous threats, the mill was destroyed.

  Cartwright’s power looms were not the first textile machines to be attacked, and they would not be the last.

  SIR ISAAC NEWTON’S THIRD law of motion states that every action is paired with an equal and opposite reaction. The “equal and opposite” reaction to the industrialization of the textile industry—and, by extension, all industrialization—is widely, though vaguely, known as Luddism.

  Resistance to the mechanization of the traditional crafts of spinning and weaving had been around for two centuries before anyone heard of Luddism, or Luddites. In 1551 Parliament passed legislation56 prohibiting mechanical gig mills, used to raise the nap on wool, and William Lee, inventor of an early knitting frame, was forced by the hosier’s guild to leave England in 1589. More often, hostility to machinery made itself known not in the form of writs and laws but crowbars and clubs. In 1675, weavers in Spitalfields attacked engines (not, of course, steam-powered) able to multiply the efforts of a single worker. Not only was Richard Hargreaves’s original spinning jenny destroyed57 in 1767, but so also was his new and improved version in 1769.