John Kay (flying shuttle)

• 1. Introduction

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  John Kay was an English inventor whose weaving device moved so fast that one early description said the shuttle could only be seen "like a tiny cloud which disappears the same instant."

  That machine became a key contribution to the Industrial Revolution. Its maker is far harder to pin down. Kay is often mistaken for a namesake who built the first spinning frame.

  So who was the man behind the blur? Why did a device that saved labour make so many people furious? What happens to an inventor when nobody pays for his patent? And why is he remembered most warmly in one Lancashire town?

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• 2. A Fifth Son's Trade

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  John Kay was born on the 17th of June 1704 in Walmersley, a Lancashire hamlet just north of Bury. His father, Robert, was a yeoman farmer who owned the Park estate there. Robert died before the boy was born.

  Park House passed to the eldest son. John was Robert's fifth son and one of ten children, so his share was modest. He was left £40, payable at the age of 21, plus schooling until he turned 14. His mother handled that schooling until she remarried.

  Within a month of starting as an apprentice to a hand-loom reed maker, John is said to have walked back home. He claimed he had already mastered the business.

  He then designed a metal substitute for the natural reed. It sold well enough that he marketed it across England. He travelled the country making and fitting wire reeds.

  On the 29th of June 1725, back in Bury, John and his brother William each married a Bury woman. John's wife was Anne Holte. Their daughter Lettice was born in 1726, and their son Robert followed in 1728.

  Kay kept tinkering with textile machinery. In 1730 he patented a cording and twisting machine for worsted. That patent came three years before the one that would bring him both fame and ruin.

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• 3. The Wheeled Shuttle

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  A patent granted in 1733 covered a wheeled shuttle for the hand loom, and it proved to be Kay's most revolutionary design.

  In weaving, the shuttle carries the weft thread through the warp threads. Kay's version crossed them faster and could span a wider stretch of cloth.

  It was designed for the broad loom. Before Kay's improvements, a second worker had to stand ready to catch the shuttle. Afterwards, a single operator per loom was enough.

  Kay himself never called it anything but a wheeled shuttle. Other people preferred the name fly-shuttle, and later flying shuttle. The reason was its unbroken speed, most striking when a young worker used it on a narrow loom.

  A device that cut the labour needed at each loom was exactly what would frighten the people who ran them.

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• 4. Weavers' Alarm

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  In July 1733 Kay formed a partnership in Colchester, Essex, to manufacture the fly-shuttle. Nobody expected unrest, since this was the first device of the modern era to lift productivity so sharply.

  By September 1733 the Colchester weavers feared for their livelihoods so deeply that they petitioned the King to stop Kay's inventions.

  Their fear had a logic. The shuttle doubled what a weaver could produce, yet spinners could make thread no faster than before. The imbalance unsettled weavers and spinners alike.

  In Bury, Kay struggled to convince woollen manufacturers that his shuttle was sturdy enough. He spent the next two years refining it until it beat the version described in the 1733 patent. That gap would hurt him in later patent disputes.

  In 1738 Kay moved to Leeds, where the trouble became collecting royalties. The annual licence fee was 15 Shillings per shuttle. He kept inventing and patented several machines that year, but industry never took them up.

  Collecting those fees would soon drag him into court.

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• 5. The Shuttle Club

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  Kay and, at first, his partners filed numerous patent infringement lawsuits. Even when a case succeeded, the compensation fell short of what it cost to bring.

  The manufacturers did not back down. They formed a syndicate called the Shuttle Club, which paid the legal costs of any member taken to court. This mix of patent piracy and mutual protection nearly bankrupted Kay.

  In 1745 he and Joseph Stell patented a machine for weaving cloth ribbon. They hoped a water wheel could drive it. Kay's legal bills stopped them from developing the plan.

  Impoverished and harassed, Kay was forced out of Leeds and went back to Bury. That same year, 1745, his twelfth and last child, William, was born.

  By 1746 Kay was working on an efficient way to produce salt and on improvements to spinning technology. The spinning work made him unpopular with Bury spinners.

  The fly-shuttle was also spreading, which raised the demand for cotton yarn and pushed up its price. Kay took the blame.

  In 1747 he would leave for a country he had never seen and whose language he did not speak.

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• 6. Life in France

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  Paris was where Kay spent all of 1747, bargaining with the French government in English to sell them his technology.

  He did not go to escape violence. He went because he could not enforce his patent rights or earn from them at home. Trudaine's Bureau de Commerce had a reputation for backing textile innovations, and it would later recruit immigrant inventors. The prospect of state support probably drew him.

  Kay wanted a huge lump sum and was refused. He settled for 3,000 livres, plus a pension of 2,500 livres a year from 1749. In return he handed over his patent and agreed to teach its use to the manufacturers of Normandy.

  He kept the sole right to make shuttles in France and brought three of his sons to Paris to build them. Memories of rioting English weavers made him wary of the manufacturing provinces. He was talked into going anyway.

  He also wrote to the French government about what was happening back home. "My new shuttles are also used in England to make all sorts of narrow woollen goods, although their use could have been more perfect had the weavers consulted me." The French authorities may at one point have discouraged such contact.

  The start of mechanised French textile production is traditionally dated to 1753, when the flying shuttle spread widely there. Most of those shuttles were copies, not made by the Kays. John tried and failed to enforce his monopoly, and he fell into quarrels with the French authorities.

  He returned briefly to England in 1756. A popular tale says a mob wrecked his Bury home in 1753 and that he barely escaped alive. That story is probably a 19th-century invention built on earlier riots in Colchester, and Kay was likely in France throughout the early 1750s.

  England offered him no better prospects, and by 1758 he was back in France, which became his adopted country. He still visited England at least twice more.

  In the winter of 1765-66 he asked the Royal Society of Arts to reward his inventions and showed them his card-making machine. The Society could find nobody who understood the shuttle, and correspondence broke down. No award was ever made.

  He was in England again in 1773 but went back to France in 1774. At the age of 70 he had lost his pension.

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• 7. The Last Letter

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  Between 1774 and 1779, the French state paid Kay only 1,700 livres in total. He had offered to teach pupils if his pension were restored, but nobody accepted.

  He spent those years designing and building machines for cotton manufacturers in Sens and Troyes. He stayed busy with engineering and letter-writing right up to 1779.

  By March 1778 he had sunk into penury. Then came a final advance, intended to help him develop yet more machinery.

  His last known letter is dated the 8th of June 1779. It was addressed to the Intendant de Commerce, listed his latest achievements, and proposed further inventions.

  Those inventions were never made, and nothing more is heard of the 75-year-old inventor. He is believed to have died later in 1779.

  His story did not end with him, because people in Bury and his own family kept it alive.

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• 8. Remembered in Bury

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  Several pubs in Bury still carry John Kay's name, as do the Kay Gardens. In the town centre stands the 1908 Memorial to John Kay, designed by William Venn Gough, with sculpture by John Cassidy.

  Planning began after a public meeting in 1903 launched a subscription. Efforts to honour Kay in the 19th century had achieved little. By 1903 the feeling was that Bury "owed John Kay's memory an atonement." The town was asked to contribute in restitution to "that wonderfully ingenious and martyred man."

  Kay's son Robert stayed in Britain. In 1760 he developed the drop-box, which let a loom use several flying shuttles at once and so weave multicolour wefts.

  Another son, John, known as French Kay, lived with his father in France for a long time. In 1782 he gave Richard Arkwright an account of his father's troubles. Arkwright wanted to show the problems of defending patents in a parliamentary petition.

  Ford Madox Brown portrayed Kay and his invention in a mural painting in Manchester Town Hall.

  In the 1840s one of Kay's great-grandsons, Thomas Sutcliffe, campaigned for a Colchester heritage for the family. In 1846 he sought a parliamentary grant for Kay's descendants as compensation, and he failed.

  His genealogy and storytelling were inaccurate. John Lord later checked primary sources in detail and discredited Sutcliffe's "Fanciful and Erroneous Statements."

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