CARTWRIGHT, EDMUND (1743-1823). It is in teresting to note how often chance figures in great discoveries and inventions. This clergyman of the church of England was 41 years old when a casual conversation turned him from the simple duties of a country parish to the checkered career of an inventor.
He was a member of an old and wealthy family of Nottinghamshire, was educated at Oxford, and had devoted his talents to religion and literature. While on a vacation he met a party of gentlemen from Man chester, and there was animated talk of Arkwright the inventor, and of the flourishing spinning mills that were producing yarn faster than the old hand looms could spin it into cloth. " Your clever Mr.
Arkwright should give his attention to the invention of a power-loom," Mr. Cartwright observed thought fully. He was told it could not be done, but the idea possessed him. He knew nothing of machinery and had never seen a loom in operation, but he set to work at the problem.
If you examine a piece of woven cloth, you will see that it is made up of two sets of threads which cross one another at right angles. The threads running lengthwise are called the " warp" and those running crosswise and interlacing are called the " weft." In the old hand-loom the shuttle which carried the weft was thrown by hand back and forth through the threads of the warp. After a year of experimenting, Cartwright in 1785 produced a machine, worked by water power, which would throw the shuttle back and forth of itself ; at the same time it shifted the threads of the warp so as to interlace with the weft, and per formed the other operations necessary in weaving.
By later improvements he brought his invention to such a degree of perfection that every essential prin ciple of it is retained in the wonderful looms in use today.
The introduction of the power-loom was violently opposed by the hand-loom weavers, and Cartwright's first mill of 400 looms was burned by rioting workmen.
This calamity, together with expensive lawsuits to protect his patents, exhausted his large private for tune. Parliament, however, in 1809 voted him $50,000 as a reward for his inventions. On this he lived modestly for the rest of his 80 years, devoting himself to scientific experiments and inventions. He gen erously assisted Robert Fulton in working out some of the problems of the steamboat. He also invented the machine which is used today for making rope.
Dr. Cartwright, as he was called, was for a generation a distinguished figure in London society, and he was universally mourned when he died in 1823. (See also Arkwright, Richard; Crompton, Samuel; Har greaves, James; Spinning and Weaving.)