At Home - Bill Bryson [212]
Before his invention, homeworkers spun five hundred thousand pounds of cotton in England every year by hand. By 1785, thanks to Hargreaves’s machine and the refined versions that followed, that figure had leaped to sixteen million pounds. Hargreaves, however, didn’t share in the prosperity that his machines created, in large part because of the machinations of Richard Arkwright, the least attractive, least inventive, but most successful of all the figures of the early Industrial Revolution.
Like Kay and Hargreaves, Arkwright was a Lancashire man—where would the Industrial Revolution have been without Lancashire men?—born in Preston in 1732, which made him eleven years younger than Hargreaves and nearly thirty years younger than Kay. (It is as well to remember that the Industrial Revolution wasn’t a sudden explosive event, but more a gradual unfolding of improvements over many lifetimes and in lots of different fields.) Before he became a man of industry, Arkwright was a publican, a wigmaker, and a barber-surgeon with a speciality in pulling teeth and bleeding those who were unwell. He seems to have gotten interested in cloth production through a friendship with another John Kay—this one a clockmaker who was no relation to the John Kay of the flying shuttle—and with his help began to pull together all the machinery and components necessary to bring the whole of mechanical cloth production under one roof. Arkwright was not a man troubled by a lot of scruples. He stole the rudiments of the spinning jenny from Hargreaves without hesitation or remorse (or of course compensation), wriggled out of business deals, and abandoned friends and partners whenever it became safe or profitable to do so.
He did have a genuine knack for making mechanical improvements, but his real genius was in turning possibilities into realities. He was an organizer—a hustler, really, but a very, very good one. Through a combination of hard work, luck, opportunism, and icy ruthlessness, he built up, for a short but extremely lucrative time, a virtual monopoly on the cotton business in England.
The people displaced by Arkwright’s machinery weren’t merely inconvenienced; they were often reduced to the basest desperation. Arkwright evidently saw this coming because he built his first factory like a fortress in a remote corner of Derbyshire—already a remote county—and fortified it with cannons and even a supply of five hundred spears. He cornered the market in the mechanical production of cloth, and in consequence grew fabulously rich, if not loved or especially happy. At his death in 1792, he employed five thousand workers and was worth £500,000—a fabulous sum for any man, but particularly for someone who had spent much of his life as a wigmaker and barber-surgeon.
In fact, the Industrial Revolution hadn’t become truly industrial yet. The man who made it so was the most unexpectedly pivotal figure of his, or almost any other, age: the Reverend Edmund Cartwright (1743–1823). Cartwright came from a well-heeled and locally important Nottinghamshire family and had aspirations to be a poet, but went into the church and was appointed to a rectorship in Leicestershire. A chance conversation with a cloth manufacturer led him to design—absolutely from out of nowhere—the power loom in 1785. Cartwright’s looms transformed the world economy and made Britain truly rich. By the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, a quarter of a million power looms were in operation in England, and the number grew by an average of 100,000 per decade before peaking at 805,000 in 1913, by which time nearly 3 million were working throughout the world.
Had Cartwright been compensated to anything like the degree his inventions merited, he would have been the richest man of his age—as rich as John D. Rockefeller or Bill Gates