Sir Richard Arkwright

Sir Richard Arkwright *

Richard Arkwright was born in 1732 in Preston, Lancashire in England. He was the youngest of thirteen children. His father was a poor labourer. At the age of ten he was an apprentice to a barber in Bolton, and twenty years of his life were spent in a cellar shop, shaving workmen at a penny a shave. It was doubtful at that time whether he could either read or write, but he had a vivid imagination and a quick brain. He became a 'hair- buyer' and later a wig-maker and eventually met and made friends with James Hargreaves, who had invented a machine nick-named 'The Spinning Jenny.' Hargreaves' Jenny could spin eight threads at once but the yarn was still inferior.

Arkwright and friend, clock maker John Kay, worked with spinning where the thread was drawn through four pairs of rollers, each moving faster than the pair before. Although this was not their idea, they worked on this together. They planned to invent a new machine which could spin a much larger number of threads and make them either as fine or as hard as they wished.

Arkwright took out his first patent in 1769; his spinning or water frame (as it was more commonly known) consisted of two large sets of rollers turning on each other, rather like an old- fashioned clothes wringer. One roller of each pair was made of steel, and finely grooved. The other was covered in leather. The fibres of the cotton plant were drawn through the grooves, compressed and stretched. Spindles then took the yarn and twisted it.

In 1767, Arkwright fled to Nottingham with a man called Hargreaves and there he met Jedediah Strutt of Derby and together they opened Arkwrights' first factory in 1771 after their role models, the Lombe Brothers, who had used water power to drive silk- spinning machines. Arkwrights machine was driven by horses. who pulled the rollers by leather belt halters. He then used water power and then finally the improved steam engine which was invented around that time by James Watt.

*Image Copyright SCRAN used under Licence