Short answers, pulled from the story.
Samuel Crompton was an English inventor born on the 3rd of December 1753 in Bolton, Lancashire, who invented the spinning mule around 1779. The spinning mule could produce thread far finer than earlier machines, making it essential to the British textile industry. He received no royalties for the invention.
The spinning mule combined the roller system of Richard Arkwright's water frame with the moving spindle carriage of Hargreaves's spinning jenny. Its carriage moved back and forth 54 inches, stretching thread and then winding it onto spindles. This produced yarn of a consistency and fineness that hand spinning could not achieve.
Crompton had no patent, lacking the money to take one out. He released the design to manufacturers after receiving promises of payment, but those promises were not honored. The machine passed into widespread use without any legal mechanism to compel payment back to him.
Parliament awarded Crompton £5,000 in 1812. He had made a tour of Lancashire and Scotland in 1811 to document how widely his mule was in use. That sum was half the £10,000 parliament had awarded Edmund Cartwright for the power loom in 1809.
A government survey in 1812 counted between 4 and 5 million mule spindles in operation across Britain. The machine was constructed in iron and eventually became fully automatic by 1834. It was adopted across Lancashire and Scotland and became central to industrial textile production.
Samuel Crompton died on the 26th of June 1827 at his house in King Street, Bolton. He was buried at the parish church of St Peter's. In his final years, friends from Bolton's Black Horse "prosecution" Club had purchased him an annuity of £63 a year without his knowledge.