INVENTORS' REWARD

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVI, Issue 53, 30 August 1913, Page 10

INVENTORS' REWARD

COTTON INDUSTRY PIONEERS. What treatment was meted out to the inventors who placed Lancashire in the forefront of the world's cotton industry? In the Liverpool Daily Post Mr. Jamee Haslam answeis the question : "Poor James Hargi eaves, of Blackburn, who gave us the spinning jenny in 1764, had to fly for his' life. To save hittißelf from mob violence, John K'.iy, the inventor of the fly-Bhuttle (l'/S3), had to decamp. He flea, secretly, to France, where he died in poverty. Lancashire to day -Joes not know whern or how he was buried. His monument Oft the Market*square in Bury, recently erected, tells us that his fly-shuttle quadrupled the human power in weaving, and placed England in the front rank as the best market in the world for t exile manufactures "Richard Arkwright, who patented his water-frame (a spinning machine driven by water) in 1769, ana founded the factory system, was compelled to leave Lancashire. A mill which he erected at Birkacre, near Chorley, was burned down while a powerful body of police and soldiers looked on. As if that wore not enough, Lancashire manu* f Acturers combined not to buy any of his yarn when he went to set up mills elsewhere Honest Samuel Crompton had to work in secret and fear of his life. "The first jpower-loom was invented by the Rev Edward Cartwright, a Suffolk clergyman, who had never seen a loom in his life. It was patented in 1785 ; in 1100 a factory filled with these looms was entered by an uncontrollable mob, of operatives, who destroyed the whole of the machinery."