Richard Arkwright

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Portrait of Richard Arkwright by Joseph Wright of Derby , in the Joseph Wright Hall of the Museum of Art and History , Derby

Sir Richard Arkwright (born December 23, 1732 in Preston , Lancashire , † August 3, 1792 in Cromford ) was a wealthy textile industrialist and inventor who owned numerous patents in the field of spinning . He is considered to be the founder of the large textile industry.

Life

Richard Arkwright

Richard Arkwright was the youngest of 13 children by a tailor. He first worked as a barber and wig maker in Bolton . Little is known about his youth. He was married to Patience, daughter of Robert Holt, a schoolmaster from Bolton. With her he had a son Richard , born on December 23, 1755, who was his only son and would later become his heir. Patience Arkwright died before 1761, because on March 24, 1761 he married Margaret Biggins of Pennington for the second time.

In March 1767 he met the watchmaker John Kay (not to be confused with the inventor of the high-speed loom of the same name ) and together with him developed a spinning machine with automatic yarn feed, the Waterframe , which he registered as a patent in 1769. They used a model of a Thomas Highs spinning machine as a template, but Arkwright himself made at least two innovations. It is said that he got Kay drunk and persuaded him to build two models of High's inventions. Arkwright used this to persuade a relative in Preston to invest. To keep Kay away from Highs, who had no idea of ​​any of this, Arkwright hired the watchmaker and took him to Manchester, then Liverpool and on to Preston. Here, two local craftsmen helped Kay build a large version of the water-powered spinning machine that took advantage of three sets of rollers, spun at greater speed, and stretched the fiber strand before the thread continued to run and twisted.

Arkwright had employed John Smalley and David Thornley to build his "Waterframe" before he left for Nottingham in April 1768 to avoid the Lancashire machine-blows. They had a small factory in the Hockley district, near James Hargreave's factory. Your machine was powered by horses. Arkwright had enough vision that he saw this only as an interim solution. In view of the immense demand for yarn in the cotton industry (with centers in Manchester and Lancashire ), which could no longer be satisfied by traditional homework, he decided (following the example of the Lombe brothers ) to build a factory . He brought in Nottingham banker Ichabod Wright and well-known businessmen Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need as financiers . The trio formed a partnership, with Strutt and Need taking on all of Arkwright's yarn production for their stocking knitting business.

In 1771, two years after the invention of the waterframe spinning machine, Richard Arkwright was able to build a large spinning mill in Cromford near Derby with the help of his financiers . The drive took place via water wheels .

In addition, he also had houses built for the weavers, a school and a church, thus establishing an industrial community at the expense of the traditional social structure (i.e. the small craftsmen and homeworkers were undercut in price, had to give up their independence and become wage workers in the factories). The demand for yarn was so great that he was able to build a second spinning mill in Cromford in 1776. The second factory was forty meters long and seven stories high. At Arkwright's Rock House in Cromford, there was a single window in the wall of the house that overlooked the workshops. With a view of the main courtyard and the workshop buildings, it made the workers feel like they were being watched by Arkwright all the time - even when he was away.

Other factories were quickly added in Manchester, Lancashire, Staffordshire and Scotland, with the factory in Chorley (Lancashire) being destroyed by machine strikers in 1779 . His workers were loyal to him and hundreds of armed men immediately stood ready to deal with threats from the machine attackers. In order to emphasize his point of view, Arkwright kept a shotgun cannon ready just outside the main entrance to his factory.

Cromford was the beginning of a massive expansion of the cotton trade, which was given a boost in 1774 when Arkwright and his partners succeeded in abolishing the import duty on raw cotton that had been imposed to protect the British wool industry.

Arkwright was the driving force and visionary in the consortium that even suffered the loss of their new factory in Birkacre, Chorley, Lancashire, to the fire in 1779. When Need died in 1781, Strutt terminated the partnership because he did not want to support Arkwright's far-reaching plans to expand its factories to Manchester and Scotland. Or maybe he was worried about patent disputes. In retrospect, this turned out to be a mistake, because seven years later there were more than 140 water-powered spinning mills spread across the country. Some were owned by Arkwright alone and others were operated under his license.

In violation of his patent rights, rival spinning mills were set up in the early 1780s: in 1781 he sued nine companies for this. All factories had more or less bad working conditions: predominantly child labor from the age of 5 to 6, 12 to 16 hours of work a day, unhealthy air due to the cotton fluff, life-threatening machines. Arkwright refused to employ children under the age of seven or eight, but this did not prevent him from turning Crompton into a "fortress". In 1790 Arkwright operated his spinning machines in Nottingham with steam power .

Arkwright was aware of his lack of schooling and, when he was old, spent an hour a day studying English grammar and another hour improving his writing and spelling. In 1786 Arkwright was knighted and was henceforth allowed to call himself "Sir". He built the mansion "Willersley Castle", which was not completed until after his death and bequeathed his descendants, including his son Richard Arkwright Junior (1755-1843) the then immense sum of 500,000 pounds. Richard Arkwright Junior continued his father's business activities just as successfully.

Patents and inventions

  • In 1769 he received a patent for the waterframe spinning machine in England . Two partners had financed the fees for the patent and were planning to use the waterframe in the factory. Despite the patent in 1783, the Waterframe was copied by Johann Gottfried Brügelmann for the Cromford textile factory in Ratingen , which established the industrial revolution on the European continent.
  • In 1775 he also received a patent for a card in England . What was new about this card was that for the first time it worked with bars and hooks instead of hook rollers. In addition, the fleece was continuously and automatically removed from the roller.
  • In 1775, Arkwright invented the lantern bench .
  • Another of his inventions is the "draw frame", a machine that combines and draws several card slivers.

Arkwright didn't invent its machines alone. He invented the water frame together with John Kay. His employee Coniah Wood also worked with other inventions or was even the actual originator. The problems with the authorship between Thomas Highs , James Hargreaves , John Kay and him then led in the legal dispute of 1785 to the fact that his patents finally expired and his inventions were therefore available to everyone.

Historians have pointed out that Richard Arkwright - even if his ideas for the spinning machines were "borrowed" - introduced the factory, that is, the organization and regulation of work in a special workplace which gives the employer total control over the product, the means and the cost of manufacturing there.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lance Day, Ian McNeil (Ed.): Biographical Dictionary of the History of Technology . Routledge, London et al. 1996, ISBN 0-415-06042-7 , pp. 393 (English).
  2. ↑ See: Kromer: Smart Clothes . 2008, p. 34 f .
  3. ↑ Luddites: War against the machines - Page 1 ( Memento of the original from November 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.cottontimes.co.uk
  4. ↑ Ichabod Wright
  5. ↑ Jedediah STRUTT - Encyclopedia Britannica 1911
  6. ↑ Samuel Need ( Memento of the original from November 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.knittingtogether.org.uk
  7. ^ - Sir Richard Arkwright's MASSON MILLS - Gateway to the Derwent Valley Mills - World Heritage Site
  8. ↑ grapeshot in the Encyclopædia Britannica
  9. ↑ Hans-Dieter Gelfert : Brief cultural history of Great Britain. From Stonehenge to the Millennium Dome (=  Beck's series . Band 1321 ). CH Beck, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-406-42121-0 , p. 173 .
  10. ^ Memoir of Samual Slater
  11. ↑ A History of Willersley Castle in Derbyshire

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Arkwright, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British textile industrialist and inventor
DATE OF BIRTH December 23, 1732
PLACE OF BIRTH Preston , Lancashire
DATE OF DEATH August 3, 1792
Place of death Cromford