Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
Let us ask ourselves this question: "Was there any ONE THING that distinguished ALL their lives, that united all these men, active in fields so different?" Yes. Hargreaves, the weaver, invented the spinning-jenny, and his invention clothes and employs hundreds of millions. Galileo perfected the telescope, spread out before man's intellect the grandeur of the universe.
But while the mechanism of trade and of government made surprising progress during the mercantile period, the mechanism of production remained in the slow handicraft stage. This was now to change. In 1738 Kay invented the flying shuttle, multiplying the capacity of the loom. In 1767 Hargreaves completed the spinning-jenny, and in 1771 Arkwright perfected his roller spinning machine.
The first of these causes, in point of time, were certain labor-saving inventions in England, which vastly enhanced the demand for raw cotton. Arkwright's invention of the spinning machine about twenty years prior to the adoption of the Constitution, perfected by the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves, and the mule of Crompton, "turned Lancashire," the historian Green says, "into a hive of industry."
For the upbuilding of the home, for the continuance of the home, men of this calling also it was who conceived and shaped, among other things, the cook-stove, the chimney, the wheel, the steam-engine, the spinning-jenny, the suspension-bridge, the bedspring-oh, boy! the bicycle, the sandblast, the automobile, the airplane, the wireless.
"His lordship did not go to bed a spinning-jenny, and rise up a lord, like some of them," put in Saunders. "Saunders," said the peer, doubtfully, "eloquence rather bores people." "Then I mustn't speak again, my lord," said Saunders, respectfully. "Noo," said the fair inquisitor, "ye shall tell me how ye came to be lorrds, your faemily?" "Saunders!"
The furniture was probably precisely like that in other houses of the class; a rude bed, table, settee, and chest of drawers, a spinning-jenny, and either three-legged stools or else chairs with backs and seats of undressed deer hides.
In the middle of May there were disturbances at Bideford, from the poor endeavouring to prevent the exportation of potatoes. There was also a riot and great disturbances at Bury, by the unemployed, to destroy a spinning-jenny. On the 24th, a great body of farmers and labourers assembled in a very riotous manner at Ely, and committed many depredations.
The exhibition of his machine in a town where so many workpeople lived by the exercise of manual labour proved a dangerous experiment; ominous growlings were heard outside the school-room from time to time, and Arkwright, remembering the fate of Kay, who was mobbed and compelled to fly from Lancashire because of his invention of the fly-shuttle, and of poor Hargreaves, whose spinning-jenny had been pulled to pieces only a short time before by a Blackburn mob, -wisely determined on packing up his model and removing to a less dangerous locality.
For it was not the discovery of the steam-engine or the spinning-jenny which constituted the revolution: it was the fact that men were now in a position to apply these discoveries to the organization of industry.
It seems unreasonable to charge the same persons with two opposite faults; but it is true that where the popular emotions are not touched, the masses will cling to old abuses from mere force of habit. As Maine says, universal suffrage would have prohibited the spinning-jenny and the power-loom, the threshing-machine and the Gregorian calendar; and it would have restored the Stuarts.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking