Samuel Crompton

• 1. Introduction

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  Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, a machine that could produce thread far finer than any human hand had ever managed. He was born on the 3rd of December 1753 at 10 Firwood Fold in Bolton, Lancashire. For five or six years, he built his machine in secret. Then he released it to the world without a patent, and the world took it freely.

  By 1812, a government survey counted between 4 and 5 million mule spindles in operation across Britain. Crompton received no royalties for the machine that drove them. His life raises a question that sits unresolved from beginning to end: what does an inventor owe the world, and what does the world owe back?

• 2. The House at Bolton

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  George Crompton, Samuel's father, worked as caretaker at Hall i' th' Wood, a timbered manor house near Bolton. He died while Samuel was still a boy, and the loss thinned an already stretched household. Samuel, the eldest of three children, had to contribute. He learned to spin yarn on James Hargreaves's spinning jenny, earning what he could to help his mother and two younger sisters.

  Hargreaves's jenny could spin thread, but not thread of consistent quality. The gap between what the machine could do and what Crompton imagined was achievable became the engine of years of private work. He kept every step of the project secret. A manufacturer who glimpsed the design could copy it freely, and Crompton had no means of stopping them.

  The violin at the Bolton theatre gave Crompton a second source of income, and he channeled those wages into materials and time. On the 16th of February 1780, he married Mary Pimlott at Bolton Parish Church. The machine he had spent years building was by then complete. Word of what he was producing had begun spreading through the manufacturing districts.

• 3. The Mule's Design

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  Around 1779, Crompton completed a machine he called the mule-jenny. It drew on two earlier inventions: Richard Arkwright's water frame and Hargreaves's jenny. The frame used rollers to twist the fibers; the jenny used a moving spindle carriage to stretch and gather the thread. The mule-jenny brought both methods together.

  The spindle carriage moved back and forth 54 inches, first stretching the thread and then winding it onto the spindles. That combination allowed the machine to spin yarn of a consistency and fineness that hand spinning could not reliably reach. Fine thread graded at 80s, achievable on the mule, sold for 42 shillings per pound. Coarse thread at 40s fetched only 14 shillings a pound.

  The machine went by two early names: the muslin wheel, and the Hall i' th' Wood wheel, after the house where it was made. The name that stuck was the spinning mule. Power was applied to assist the carriage's inward motion in 1790. By 1834, the machine was fully automatic, what contemporary engineers called self-acting.

• 4. No Patent, No Protection

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  Demand for the yarn Crompton was making was strong, and that demand attracted notice. Manufacturers from the surrounding districts had heard of the machine and wanted to understand how it worked. With no patent protecting his design, Crompton could not legally stop them from looking.

  Bolton's manufacturers began finding ways to observe the machine at work. Crompton faced a choice between destroying his invention or making it public. He chose to make it public, after a number of manufacturers promised to pay him for the right to use the mule. Those promises proved worthless.

  In 1800, a subscription among people sympathetic to his situation raised £500 for his benefit. That sum was a voluntary gesture, but one that bore no proportion to what the mule was by then generating across the mills of Lancashire. The machine was already being built by others across the country, constructed in iron and spreading through the textile trade.

• 5. Parliament's Reckoning

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  In 1809, Edmund Cartwright, the inventor of the power loom, received £10,000 from parliament in recognition of his contribution to the industry. Crompton took note. He had never received payment commensurate with the value his machine had created.

  In 1811, Crompton toured the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Scotland himself, gathering evidence of how widely the spinning mule was in use. What he documented was a machine woven into the fabric of the entire textile trade. Parliament weighed his case and in 1812 awarded him £5,000. That was half what Cartwright had received.

  The £5,000 funded two business attempts. He tried work as a bleacher, and then as a cotton merchant and spinner. Both failed. In 1824, friends and members of Bolton's Black Horse "prosecution" Club purchased an annuity of £63 a year for him. The group included Isaac and Benjamin Dobson, Benjamin Hick, John Kennedy, and Peter Rothwell. They arranged it without telling him.

  Crompton died at his house in King Street, Bolton on the 26th of June 1827, and was buried at the parish church of St Peter's. His son George, born on the 8th of January 1781, had followed him into the spinning trade. He worked in an industry shaped at its core by his father's machine. That machine had been built at Hall i' th' Wood, where his grandfather had once served as caretaker.