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A working instrument-maker gave us the steam-engine; a barber, the spinning-machine; a weaver, the mule; a pitman perfected the locomotive; and working men of all grades have, one after another, added to the triumphs of mechanical skill. By the working man, we do not mean merely the man who labours with his muscles and sinews. A horse can do this.
From Brindley, the constructor of the earliest great canal, to Joseph Gillott, the inventor of the very steel pen with which this book is written; from Arkwright the barber who fashioned the first spinning-machine, to Crompton the weaver, whose mule gave rise to the mighty Manchester cotton trade; from Newcomen, who made the first rough attempt at a steam-engine, to Stephenson, who sent the iron horse from end to end of the land, the chief mechanical improvements in the country have almost all been due to the energy, intelligence, and skill of our labouring population.
After getting Kay to construct for him certain wooden models, which convinced him that the solution of the problem had been accomplished, he is said to have applied to a Mr. Atherton, of Warrington, to make the spinning-machine, who, from the poverty of Arkwright's appearance, declined to undertake it.
Many attempts were made about that time to invent a spinning-machine, and our barber determined to launch his little bark on the sea of invention with the rest. Like other self-taught men of the same bias, he had already been devoting his spare time to the invention of a perpetual-motion machine; and from that the transition to a spinning-machine was easy.
It was a sort of monotonous purring, like that made by a spinning-machine, or a very large tom-cat; and like the latter, it was prolonged and continuous. The sound was not exactly pleasant to Ivan's ear, for it denoted the proximity of some animal; and, although it was not loud, there was something about the tone that told him the animal giving utterance to it was a creature to be feared.
The cotton manufactures are much improved, and the manufactories in that line are daily increasing in number and perfection. A new spinning-machine has produced here, I am told, 160,000 ells in length out of a pound of cotton. The fly-shuttle is now introduced into most of the manufactories in this country, and 25 pieces of narrow goods are thus made at once by a single workman.
A cotton-mill was first erected at Nottingham, driven by horses; and another was shortly after built, on a much larger scale, at Cromford, in Derbyshire, turned by a water-wheel, from which circumstance the spinning-machine came to be called the water- frame. Arkwright's labours, however, were, comparatively speaking, only begun. He had still to perfect all the working details of his machine.
Any coarse bit of mechanism was called a jack, and is yet. In most factories there are testing-jacks, gearing-jacks, lifting-jacks. Falstaff tells of a jack-of-all-trades. The jack was anything strong, patient and serviceable. When Hargreaves, the Lancashire carpenter, invented his spinning-machine, a village wit called it a "jenny."
She spun the threads with which the rebosos were woven. If the loom was a simple piece of mechanism, much more so was the spinning-machine the "huso," or "malacate" which was nothing more or less than the "whirligig spindle." Yet with this primitive apparatus did the old dame draw out and twist as smooth a thread as ever issued from the "jenny." "Poor dear Carlos!
Logic without revelation is like a spinning-machine without any cotton, busy drawing out nothing. Here we have to listen. 'The entrance of Thy words giveth light. Your God shall come and save you; then, by that divine coming and saving, 'the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. II. Christ as the Restorer of the Powers of Action.
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