ARKWRIGHT, SIR Richard, English in ventor : b. Preston, Lancashire, 23 Dec. 1732; d. 3 Aug. 1792. He was the youngest of 13 chil dren, and was bred to the trade of a barber. His residence in a cotton-spinning district (Bol ton) dreW his attention to the operations of that manufacture; but he was 35 before he de voted himself to consideration of the subject.
The spinning-jenny, invented in 1767 by Har greaves, gave the means of spinning 20 or 30 threads at once with no more, labor than had previously been required to spin a single thread; but the thread spun by the jenny, could not, however, be used as warp, being destitute of the firmness required. Arkwright supplied this deficiency by the invention of the spinning frame, which spins a vast number of threads of any degree of fineness and hardness, leaving the operator merely to feed the machine with cot ton and to join the threads when they happen to break. His invention introduced the system of spinning by rollers, the carding or roving as it is technically termed (that is, the soft, loose strip of cotton) passing through one pair of rollers and being received by a second pair, which are made to revolve with three, four or five times the velocity of the first pair. By this contrivance the roving is drawn out into a thread of the desired degree of tenuity, a twist being given to it by the adaptation of the spindle and fly of the old flaxwheel to the ma chinery. The precise date of his invention is not known, but it is most probable that the idea of 'spinning by rollers had occurred to his mind as early as the period when Hargreaves was engaged in the invention of the jenny. He re moved to Nottingham in 1768, in order to avoid the attacks of the lawless rabble who thought his machines would deprive many workmen of a livelihood. Arkwright erected his first mill, which was driven by horses, at Nottingham, and took out a patent for spinning by rollers, in 1769. He built a second factory on a much larger scale at Cromford, in Derbyshire, in 1771, the machinery being turned by a waterwheel, and having made several additional discoveries and improvements, took out a fresh patent for the whole in 1775, thus completing a series of ingenious and complicated machinery. When
the importance of his inventions became known efforts were made to have the patent set aside, and in 1781 Arkwright brought actions against a number of persons for invading his patent. Only one cause was tried, that against Colonel Mordaunt in the Court of King's Bench in July 1781; and in that the verdict went against Arkwright on the ground of defective specification. In February 1785, a second action was tried in the court of common pleas, in which Arkwright brought a number of persons to prove that they could make machines from his specifications, in consequence of which he obtained a verdict in his favor. This pro ducing great alarm among many who had erected machines for cotton spinning, and from whom a royalty was demanded, in order to settle the dispute a suit was brought against Arkwright in the Court of King's Bench, in which the whole question was argued, not only as to the intelligibility of his specification, but on the less technical and more important ground of his not being himself the inventor of the machines for which he had obtained a patent. After a long and ably-conducted trial a verdict was given against Arkwright, and in November 1785 the patent was canceled. None of Ark wright's most intimate friends, or those best ac quainted with his character, ever had the slight est doubt with respect to the originality of his invention. In 1786 Arkwright received the honor of knighthood from George III, and un like many inventors, he amassed a large fortune by his inventions. Consult Baines, of Cotton Manufacture) (London 1861), and Ure, The Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain) (London).