Jedediah Strutt

Portrait of Jedediah Strutt by Joseph Wright of Derby , oil on canvas around 1790, in the Joseph Wright Hall of the Museum of Art and History , Derby

Jedediah Strutt (born July 26, 1726 in South Normanton , † May 7, 1797 in Derby ) was an English textile entrepreneur of the 18th century. He is considered one of the fathers of the industrial revolution .

origin

Strutt was the second of three sons to a farmer and maltster. The family belonged to a Presbyterian parish. At the age of 14 Jedediah was apprenticed to a cartwright after Findern , where he met his future wife Elizabeth Woollat in the vicinity of the doctor and dissenter Ebenezer Latham .

The derby rib

In 1759 Strutt was granted a patent for a machine that enabled him to manufacture ribbed cotton goods. He had bought the idea or a prototype from a man named Roper for 5 pounds, a sum for which he had to sell a pack horse . Together with his brother-in-law Woollatt and with the occasional participation of Roper, he developed the device as a functioning addition to existing knitting machines. The Derby Rib quickly became a great success and, together with the mechanical loom, sparked the historic hunger for yarn, the increased need for cotton yarn that led to the invention of mechanical spinning machines. Around 1769, Strutt and his partner Samuel Need financed Richard Arkwright's first water-powered cotton mill in Cromford .

The industrial revolution

Today Arkwright is considered to be the inventor of the modern factory system. Half a century before he invented the waterframe and built his factory in Cromford, the Lombe brothers' silk mill in Derby had already started operations. It was also powered by hydropower and was a modern-scale factory. Need and Strutt had taken over silk production in Derby since the 1860s. Both the Derby Silk Mill and Arkwright's factories in Cromford and Matlock Bath and Strutts' cotton factories in Derby, Milford , Darley Abbey and Belper are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites of the Derwent Valley because of their importance for the Industrial Revolution .

Social

Strutt is commonly portrayed as a caring patriarch. His portrait of Joseph Wright in the Museum of Art and History in Derby shows him pensive, gazing into the distance, his arm propped on a book. You think you see the withdrawn dissenter in front of you rather than the tough entrepreneur. The settlements that he had built around his factory sites offered a good standard of living for the time and were apparently socially intact communities. Fitten and Wadsworth point out that they were not much inferior to the idealized community that Robert Owen believed he invented a generation later.

literature

RS Fitton, Alfred P. Wadsworth: The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1758-1830. A study of the early factory system. Manchester University Press, Manchester 1958.

Web links

Commons : Jedediah Strutt - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

↑ see e.g. Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, London 1964, p. 220.
↑ This, by the way, also with regard to Richard Arkwright, who enjoys a far worse reputation than Strutt: "The idealized community, which Robert Owen thought he had invented at New Lanark was not much different from those at Cromford and Belper that had preceeded it." Fitton / Wadsworth 1958, p. 98.

personal data
SURNAME	Strutt, Jedediah
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British textile industrialist and inventor
DATE OF BIRTH	July 26, 1726
PLACE OF BIRTH	South Normanton , Derbyshire
DATE OF DEATH	May 7, 1797
Place of death	Derby

[1] see e.g. Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century, London 1964, p. 220.

[2] This, by the way, also with regard to Richard Arkwright, who enjoys a far worse reputation than Strutt: "The idealized community, which Robert Owen thought he had invented at New Lanark was not much different from those at Cromford and Belper that had preceeded it." Fitton / Wadsworth 1958, p. 98.