Sir Richard Arkwright is credited with inventing the spinning frame, a machine that transformed cotton-spinning not only by improving the quality of production but also by multiplying exponentially the output of production. He instituted many of the policies and procedures that contributed to the success (and the oppression) of the Industrial Revolution: factory housing, child labor, worker exploitation, extended workdays, and mass production. Arkwright thus created a living legacy, as many of these business practices are still in use.
Arkwright was born on December 23, 1732, in Preston, in Lancashire, England, the youngest of 13 children. His cousin Ellen educated him, as his parents could not afford to send him to school. As a teenager, he apprenticed to a barber, then established his own barbershop, which was successful until he opened a pub that lost money. He had one son with his first wife. After she died, he remarried in 1761. In 1762, he started a wig-making business and traveled around the countryside gathering women’s hair for wigs.
On his travels, he met John Kay, a Warring-ton clockmaker who had designed a spinning machine in partnership with Thomas Highs of Leigh. However, the pair had run out of funds, forcing them to abandon the project. Arkwright financed Kay to continue building the machine; legend has it that they worked in a room rented from a teacher in a house secluded behind gooseberry bushes—neighbors reported that the racket they made building the machine sounded like the devil tuning his bagpipes.
In 1768, Arkwright moved from Preston, where he feared that local spinners would attack him for robbing them of their handicraft, to Nottingham, where he took up a new partnership with John Smalley and filed a patent for his spinning frame. The genius of Arkwright’s design, and what distinguished it from james hargreaves’s spinning jenny and other spinning machines of the day, was the order of operation: instead of stretching and spinning the cotton fibers simultaneously, the spinning frame drew out the cotton roving with three sets of paired rollers turning at increasing speeds, which stretched the roving to quadruple its original length before twisting it. Furthermore, the spinning frame spun 128 threads at a time and required only one unskilled laborer to operate it. The spinning frame had the necessary features to implement mass production.
Arkwright first built a mill run by horsepower, but he could not afford the expansion necessary to grow the business, so he sought new partnerships. In 1769, the Derby hosiers Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt agreed to finance Ark-wright’s new design, the water frame, essentially a spinning frame driven by waterpower. In August 1771, Arkwright leased land on the Bon-sall Brook just above the River Derwent in Cromford, Derbyshire, where he built a five-story factory. The key to this location was the Cromford Sough, which drained hot springs water into the Bonsall Brook just above the factory site, thus preventing the river water from freezing in the winter and allowing Arkwright to run his factory year-round.
The population of Cromford could not provide enough workers to run the factory, so Ark-wright advertised throughout Derbyshire for large families, enticing them by providing housing. Indeed, he’d built a village of cottages specially constructed with a weaving shed on the top floor for the weavers to turn into cloth the yarn that their wives and children had milled at the factory. Children, who started work as early as age six, comprised his primary workforce (some two-thirds of Arkwright’s 1,900 workers), as their dexterity made them up to 10 times more productive than adults. A brilliant manager, he persuaded workers to put in 13-hour days, and he ran several shifts so that his mills operated 23 hours a day.
In 1773, Arkwright’s mills produced the first cloth made completely from cotton (previously only the weft was cotton, and the warp was linen), but a 1736 act of Parliament had imposed a double duty on calicoes; in 1774, Parliament enacted a special exemption for Arkwright, enabling him to continue his all-cotton fabric production. He filed a patent in 1775 covering all the preliminary stages of his production process—including processes invented by others, who in 1783 disputed the patent, which was annulled in 1785.
Arkwright was knighted in 1786, and the next year he was made the high sheriff of Derbyshire. He continued to expand his business, establishing factories throughout Derbyshire, Lancashire, Staffordshire, and even extending into Scotland. He tended to follow the same blueprint at all his factories, constructing stone buildings 30 feet by 100 feet or longer, and five-to-seven stories tall. His factory system became the model for the Industrial Revolution and was followed throughout the industrializing world. He continued to innovate, using steam power to run some of his factories after 1790. When Arkwright died on August 3, 1792, in Cromford, he had amassed a fortune of some half-a-million pounds.
