Thomas Highs

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Highs died on the 13th of December 1803, aged eighty-four, at the expense of a stranger. William Drinkwater, a Manchester cotton spinner, paid for his burial in the New Jerusalem Chapel. For years before that, Drinkwater had been giving Highs a guinea a month to keep him alive. Five extra guineas arrived on every the 24th of June and every the 24th of December. Highs had spent decades building spinning machines across England and Ireland. The man he accused of stealing the most important of those machines became Sir Richard Arkwright. Arkwright gained a knighthood and a fortune built from the cotton trade. Highs died in obscurity. Who actually invented the roller-spinning mechanism that transformed England's textile industry is a question that has never been cleanly answered.

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• 2. Reed Maker to Engine Builder

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  Leigh, Lancashire was not yet an industrial center when Thomas Highs was born there in 1718. His trade was reed making, a craft tightly bound to the loom. A reed is a comb-like strip fitted to the batten of a loom. It keeps the warp threads apart and helps the weaver press each new row of weft threads tightly into the cloth. He married Sarah Moss on the 23rd of February 1747, at Leigh Parish Church. Five years later, he became interested in cotton-spinning machinery.

  By 1763, Highs was working alongside John Kay, a clockmaker who lived close by. Their goal was a spinning engine. Between 1766 and 1767, Highs worked out a method of spinning by rollers. The approach resembled a technique already patented by Lewis Paul and John Wyatt. He engaged Kay again to help build the mechanism. In 1773, Highs completed the one invention that no one disputes he made: a perpetual carding engine. He also developed an improved double spinning jenny. Kay eventually left Leigh to return to his native Warrington, a few miles away, taking his knowledge of Highs's machines with him.

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• 3. The Stolen Machine

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  About 1767, Thomas Highs was working in secret. He had moved to a house in Bradshawgate, Leigh, and kept a special room there to hide his roller-frame. What he was building, if the allegations that followed were accurate, addressed a problem the spinning jenny could not solve.

  The jenny, credited to James Hargreaves, produced thread that was fine but unsuitable for warp. Warp threads run the full length of a cloth and take more tension than the horizontal weft threads. The jenny's thread was only soft enough for weft; linen still had to supply the warp. Highs, it is alleged, constructed a machine using rollers that produced stronger thread. His device passed raw roving through two pairs of gripping rollers. The second pair rotated at five times the speed of the first. This stretched the thread to exactly five times its original length. A bobbin and flyer then gave the thread its twist. The result was cotton strong enough to serve as warp.

  To produce a working metal version of his roller mechanism, Highs turned to John Kay. He gave Kay a wooden model and asked him to reproduce it in metal. Kay completed the work.

  Richard Arkwright met Kay on his business travels. At a public house, over a drink, Arkwright gained Kay's confidence and drew out the secrets of Highs's design. Highs was not the only one who would eventually testify in London against Arkwright's claim. Whether that testimony would be enough to unseat Arkwright's patents was a question the courts would take years to answer.

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• 4. The London Trials

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  In 1775, Richard Arkwright took out patents on an ambitious system. They covered the full sequence of cotton manufacture, from cleaning raw material to carding it to the final spinning of thread. Six years later, in 1781, Arkwright went to court to defend those patents. The move rebounded. His patents were overturned.

  After a temporary restoration, the patents faced a second challenge in 1785, this time in London. Arkwright had applied for at least five patents. In court, they were attacked on four grounds. The first was that they harmed the public interest. The second was that the inventions were not new. The third was that Arkwright was not their true creator. The fourth was that the patent descriptions were too vague. The July 1781 case and the February 1785 case both turned on the intelligibility argument, the complaint that the patents were insufficiently described. In June 1785, the court addressed the harder question: whether Arkwright had originated the inventions at all.

  Highs was present at the February 1785 trial as a witness. He testified that he had made fluted rollers. He said nothing about the spinning jenny. Arkwright's own submissions to that court stated, as a matter of established fact, that James Hargreaves had invented it. Four people gave evidence against Arkwright's claim to the rollers: Highs himself, John Kay, Kay's wife, and the widow of James Hargreaves. The June 1785 judgment set Arkwright's patents aside. Because the court found he was not the inventor, later readers of the verdict concluded that Highs must have been.

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• 5. Historians at War

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  Richard Guest made the boldest claim in 1823. That year he published 'A History of Cotton Manufacture'. His argument was that Highs had been the true inventor of both the spinning jenny and Arkwright's rollers. The Baines family quoted the work in their 'History of Lancashire', and a writer named McCullough cited it in the Edinburgh Review. Guest then self-published a 233-page volume, 'The British Cotton Manufactures', in which he accused both Baines and McCullough of plagiarism. He insisted that Highs deserved the credit.

  Edward Baines responded in 1835. In his 'History of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain', Baines addressed Guest's claims in an extensive footnote and dismissed them. The two positions, Guest's assertion and Baines's rejection, became the reference points that later writers returned to again and again. For roughly 170 years, both works were recycled as sources for new definitive accounts of the era.

  Guest relied on Highs's movements to make his case. He argued that Highs had been physically close to the acknowledged inventors at the critical moments. From that closeness, Guest concluded that Highs must have been the source. The historians were filling a gap that the legal record had never formally closed. One of the men whose proximity to Highs Guest found most suggestive was Samuel Crompton of Bolton.

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• 6. Crompton and the Mule

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  Samuel Crompton of Bolton invented the spinning mule. The machine combined the moving-carriage principle of the spinning jenny with the drafting rollers of the water frame. Crompton claimed he had arrived at the design entirely on his own, beginning work in 1772. He said he had a working design by 1779.

  Thomas Highs moved to Bolton-le-Moors in 1773, the year after Crompton began. He stayed until 1776. The two men were not strangers; both belonged to the same tightly-knit Swedenborgian religious sect. At that time, Highs was one of a very few men who had direct experience with both the jenny and the roller-spinning frame. The question of what passed between them in those three years has never been answered.

  Crompton went on to receive recognition for the mule. Highs, who shared a community with him and understood the machines the mule combined, is nowhere in Crompton's account.

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• 7. A Life of Wandering

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  About 1769, Highs carried hanks of thread spun on his new machine to the Board of Trade in Manchester. He was hoping to attract an investor. He found none. Undeterred, he moved to Camp Street, Manchester, in 1770 or 1771 and built a double-jenny with twenty-eight spindles on each side. In 1772, his son, also named Thomas Highs and then about ten years old, demonstrated the machine publicly at Manchester Exchange. The manufacturers who gathered there subscribed two hundred guineas and presented them to Highs in recognition of his ingenuity.

  That same year, Highs moved to Wilderspool farm in Barton-upon-Irwell to develop the carding engine he had been working on. By 1776, he was back in Manchester, at No. 6 Deansgate, opposite the Wool Pack. A merchant named Mr. Smith agreed to partner with him and build a spinning factory in Yorkshire, where water power was plentiful. The arrangement ended when Smith drowned at Blackpool.

  In 1777, Highs went to Nottingham to build machines for a firm known as Stanfield and Hallam, or possibly Bancroft and Hallam. The next two years took him to Kidderminster, working for manufacturers including Pardoe, Lea and Company. By 1780, he was in Ireland, managing machinery for Baron Hamilton. Hamilton was building a cotton factory on his estate at Balbriggan, near Dublin. In 1785, a court summons called him back to testify against Arkwright. Around 1790, a stroke ended his working life. The factory at Balbriggan that he had helped equip continued without him; he never returned.

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