Short answers, pulled from the story.
Thomas Highs (1718-1803) was a reed maker from Leigh, Lancashire, who built cotton carding and spinning machines during the Industrial Revolution. He is known for claiming to have invented both the spinning jenny and the roller-spinning mechanism later associated with Richard Arkwright.
Highs undisputedly invented a perpetual carding engine in 1773 and an improved double spinning jenny. He also developed a roller-spinning method between 1766 and 1767, though credit for this has been disputed with Richard Arkwright for roughly 170 years.
It is alleged that Highs developed a roller-spinning mechanism and shared a wooden model with clockmaker John Kay, who then revealed the design to Arkwright. Arkwright's patents were set aside by the courts in June 1785, but the court never formally named Highs as the original inventor; later historians drew that conclusion themselves.
According to the allegation, Highs gave clockmaker John Kay a wooden model of his roller mechanism and asked him to make a working metal version. Arkwright met Kay on his business travels and, over a drink at a public house, persuaded Kay to reveal the secrets of the machine.
Both Highs and Crompton lived in Bolton-le-Moors between 1773 and 1776 and belonged to the same Swedenborgian religious sect. Crompton claimed to have independently invented the spinning mule, but Highs was at that time one of very few men with direct experience of both the spinning jenny and the roller-spinning frame.
Thomas Highs died on the 13th of December 1803, aged eighty-four, in Manchester, with his burial paid for by a cotton spinner named William Drinkwater. A stroke around 1790 had ended his working life, and he spent his final years on Drinkwater's charity of a guinea a month.