Edmund Cartwright

• 1. Introduction

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  Edmund Cartwright is the name behind a machine that a Manchester mill owner never got to finish installing. In 1790, Robert Grimshaw built a weaving factory at Knott Mill in Gorton, planning to fill it with 500 of Cartwright's power looms. Only 30 had been installed when the building burned down, likely set alight by hand loom weavers afraid the machines would take their trade. That single fire raises a set of questions worth following. How did a country clergyman end up designing a machine violent enough to provoke arson? The loom itself is only part of the story. Cartwright also held church livings in three counties, published poetry, and grew up alongside two brothers who left their own mark on history. What ties these threads together?

• 2. The Loom That Provoked Arson

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  Cartwright designed his first power loom in 1784, after making contact with textile men from Manchester, and patented it in 1785. Its real value lay only in proving the concept possible, though the basic design persisted into the 20th century. Later researchers, not Cartwright himself, are now credited with making a genuinely practical version of the machine.

  A second patent followed in 1789, offering later inventors a model to build on. Cartwright reasoned that a mechanically driven loom needed one of two things to succeed commercially. Either one worker had to tend several machines at once, or each machine had to out-produce a hand loom by a wide margin. He added a positive let-off motion and stop motions for the warp and weft threads. He also found a way to size the warp while the loom kept running.

  Manufacturing his own fabrics in Doncaster exposed the design's weaknesses firsthand. He introduced a crank and eccentric wheels to drive the batten unevenly. He refined the picking mechanism that threw the shuttle across the loom. One new device stopped the loom whenever a shuttle failed to land in its box. Another kept a shuttle from rebounding once it arrived there. Temples that stretched the cloth automatically rounded out his fixes. Creditors repossessed his mill in 1793.

  In 1792 Cartwright secured his final weaving patent, giving the loom multiple shuttle boxes for weaving checks and cross stripes. None of it solved the core problem. Warps still had to be sized while the loom sat still. His attempts to size them during operation, or beforehand, both failed. William Radcliffe and his assistant Thomas Johnson finally solved this in 1803, inventing the beam warper and the dressing sizing machine.

  Parliament recognized the invention's importance in 1809, granting Cartwright £10,000. In May 1821, the Royal Society elected him a Fellow, recognition that arrived decades after his very first patent.

• 3. A Clergyman's Path

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  Marnham, in Nottinghamshire, is where Cartwright was born on the 24th of April 1743, the fourth son of William Cartwright and his wife Anne, who shared his surname before marriage. He attended Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield. He had already been studying at University College, Oxford, from 1757, though he did not formally matriculate there until 1760. Oxford awarded him a Bachelor of Arts in 1764, the same year Magdalen College elected him a Fellow. He earned a Master of Arts in 1766, and in 1806 the university granted him a Doctor of Divinity.

  The Church of England ordained him a deacon in 1765 and a priest in 1767, the same year he became rector of Kilvington. He added the rectory of Goadby Marwood, in Leicestershire, in 1779. In 1783 he was elected a prebendary at Lincoln Cathedral.

  Woburn Abbey is where Cartwright served for a time as chaplain to the Duke of Bedford. He also tutored the Duke's son, who later became Prime Minister as Lord John Russell. Once the parliamentary grant came through, Cartwright bought a small farm in Kent and spent the rest of his life there. He died on the 30th of October 1823, in Sussex, after a lingering illness, and was buried at Battle, leaving behind inventions far beyond weaving.

• 4. Beyond The Loom

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  A wool combing machine came first, patented in 1789. In 1792 Cartwright patented a cordelier, a machine built for making rope. He also designed a steam engine that ran on alcohol instead of water. Mechanical invention was not his only creative outlet.

• 5. A Poet's Sideline

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  John Langhorne tutored Cartwright as a young man, and he went on to publish as a minor poet. In 1770 he published the poem Armine and Elvira. That was followed in 1779 by The Prince of Peace, a poem directed against the American Revolutionary War. His 1783 collection, Sonnets to Eminent Men, included an ode to Thomas Howard, the 3rd Earl of Effingham, a prominent supporter of American independence. Effingham's support for the colonies sat squarely at odds with the war Cartwright's earlier poem had opposed.

• 6. Brothers, Marriages, and Children

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  Major John Cartwright, a political reformer known for radical views, was Edmund's brother. So was George Cartwright, who explored Labrador.

  One early account describes Cartwright marrying a local woman named Elizabeth McMac when he was 19. The fuller family record instead traces his first marriage to 1772, to Alice Whitaker, daughter of Alderman Richard Whitaker of Doncaster, who died in 1785.

  Their second daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1780 and died in 1837, married the Reverend John Penrose and wrote books under the pseudonym 'Mrs Markham'. Their daughter Mary married Henry Eustatius Strickland, a younger son of Sir George Strickland, 5th Baronet, and became the mother of Hugh Edwin Strickland. Mary later served as her father's biographer, publishing A Memoir of the Life, Writings, and Inventions, of Edmund Cartwright, D.D. FRS in 1843, incorporating a memoir Cartwright had written himself.

  Their son, the Reverend Edmund Cartwright, born in 1773 and died in 1833, was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London. The youngest child, Frances Dorothy Cartwright, became a poet and later wrote her own biography of her radical uncle, Major John Cartwright.

  Cartwright married a second time, in 1790, to Susannah Kearney, daughter of John Kearney, and she survived him along with the four children from his first marriage. Frances Dorothy's biography of her uncle placed one Cartwright sibling's radical politics permanently alongside the mechanical legacy of another.