Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  While the early trials had left room for further actions, both sides knew that this would be the deciding case. Edward Bearcroft once again appeared for Arkwright’s opponents. He first argued that Arkwright’s 1775 carding patent repeated much of the earlier 1769 spinning patent, including the crucial use of rollers, and was therefore an attempt to extend his earlier patent beyond its legal term. He then examined the ten elements of the 1775 patent specification, arguing that none of them were truly original and several were in fact superfluous to the working of the machine. In any case, he declared, the original spinning patent of 1769 had been wrongly awarded, as Arkwright had stolen the machine from Thomas Highs.

  Highs and John Kay appeared in person to testify to Arkwright’s dishonesty in stealing Highs’s original idea. In his evidence, Highs reported that he had met with Arkwright in Manchester in 1771, two years after the patent had been granted:

  We were in some discourse about the rollers: I told him, he would never have known them but for me; and he put his hand in this manner, I remember very well in this manner, to his knee, and that was the answer he gave; also he told me, when I told him it was my invention, Suppose it was, he says, if it was, he says, if any man has found a thing, and begun a thing, and does not go forwards, he lays it aside, and any other man has a right in so many weeks or months . . . to take it up and get a patent for it.7

  John Kay told the court of his association with Highs. He reported that he had passed on to Arkwright what he had learned about the machine from Highs, and that Arkwright had asked him to make a model of Highs’s roller frame. By the time of the summing-up the case had drifted away from Arkwright. Justice Buller gave the jury three questions to answer for each of the two patents. Was the invention new? If so, was it invented by the defendant? And finally, was it sufficiently described in the specification? This last point particularly exercised the judge, who saw it as crucial to the development and implementation of patent law. The specification must enable the public to understand the invention in detail: ‘This I take to be clear law, as far as respects the specifications; for the patent is the reward, which, under an Act of Parliament, is held out for a discovery, and therefore, unless the discovery be true and fair, the patent is void. – If the specification, in any part of it, be materially false or defective, the patent is against the law, and cannot be supported.’8 A patent application must reveal the idea to the world and in return expect protection. The judge further stated – and this was surely fatal to Arkwright’s case – that if any elements within the patent were not relevant to the invention but were added merely to puzzle or confuse, then on that ground alone the patent would be void. Not surprisingly the jury did not even feel the need to leave the courtroom but immediately brought in a verdict against Arkwright.

  When Arkwright’s solicitors tried to apply for a new trial in the Court of the King’s Bench or in the Court of Chancery, Justice Buller told them that ‘the defendant had not a leg to stand on’. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, also refused the application and on 14 November 1785 Arkwright’s patents were cancelled.

  The court’s verdict caused rejoicing in Manchester, where a special broadsheet announced: ‘to the great joy of thousands, the old fox is at last caught by his overgrown beard in his own trap . . . it is hoped, the dose that has now been administered to him, will entirely purge him from all his hatefulness and tyranny, and from his every justifiable claim and demand, whereby he has amassed such an immoderate sum of money’.9

  But others were not so sure that the verdict was a good outcome. On 13 August 1785 James Watt wrote to Matthew Boulton: ‘I am tired of making improvements which by some quirk or wresting of the law may be taken from us, as I think has been done in the case of Arkwright, who has been condemned merely because he did not specify quite clearly. This was injustice, because it is plain he has given this trade a being – has brought his invention into use and made it of great public utility.’

  While Watt feared for his own patents, Boulton believed Arkwright had lost because he was essentially in the wrong. He wrote to Watt after the 1785 trial: ‘Surely you cannot think it just that any tyrant should tyrannise over so large a manufactory by false pretences. He had no shadow of right and the whole court were unanimous that no mention was made in his specification of the thing or principle that was there in dispute.’

  The Arkwright case was a landmark. It sent a clear signal to inventors that if they did not supply accurate, original and usable specifications they could lose the rights in their inventions, whatever patents they were awarded. Arkwright, in this at least, proved an unwilling pioneer.

  14. Manchester: The First Industrial City

  MANCHESTER IS THE city of the Industrial Revolution. Its prodigious growth from a market town in the early eighteenth century to an industrial metropolis of world importance a hundred years later is well documented. The factories, slums and terrible living conditions that ensued are part of industrial folklore, as described by the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville in 1820: ‘Crowds are ever hurrying this way and that in the Manchester streets . . . From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world.’1 But Manchester was also the wonder of the modern world, a nexus of innovation, vision and commerce; a place that drew engineers, inventors, merchants, workers, social commentators, politicians, writers and visitors from all over the world. This was the world’s first industrial city.2

  Manchester was fascinating because everything about the place was new; it grew from a small town to a world city in a few decades – from 10,000 inhabitants in 1720 to 70,000 in 1800 and 140,000 in 1830 – and all on the basis of the industrial production and trading of one commodity: cotton. Or so it seemed; while cotton was the commercial driving force, Manchester was from the very beginnings a multifaceted city showing innovations in education, politics and social arrangements. And while Manchester was an industrial city, it combined production and trading in a mutually supportive process – there were always more warehouses than factories – and rapidly built the social infrastructure of a modern city to support its astonishingly successful commerce.3

  For some, Manchester was full of robber barons making money without concern for the poor amongst whom they lived. But this belied the other side of the city, for while the cotton industry provided the money it also drove new social forces into being. Manchester became a seedbed of Chartism, trade unionism and socialism, and it provided a radical alternative voice in the country against the established powers of the capital; at the same time the city’s merchants and middle classes formed an influential force, leading the campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws and in favour of free trade, while opposing imperialist adventurism, thereby expressing a brand of liberalism that became known as the Manchester School.4

  So how did Manchester become not only the first industrial city but the prototype modern city? In 1795 the physician and editor John Aikin wrote: ‘the cotton manufacture; a branch of commerce, the rapid and prodigious increase of which is, perhaps, absolutely unparalleled in the annals of trading nations. Manchester is, as it were, the heart of this vast system, the circulating branches of which spread all around it, though to different distances . . . its influence is spread, more or less, over the greatest part of Lancashire, and the north-eastern portion of Cheshire.’5

  Aikin pointed to an important fact: Manchester was not an isolated city but the centre of a web of connections. It was a kind of super-economy within the industrial economy of south Lancashire, which was itself the focus of British industrialisation. The Industrial Revolution saw the concentration of productive activity, previously spread widely across the country, into particular areas: in 1831 an astonishing 70 per cent of industrial jobs were in Lancashire and the neighbouring West Riding of Yorkshire.6 Birmingham, Derby, Nottingham, Coalbrookdale, Cromford, Sheffield, Halifax, Leeds, Bradford and even Camborne and Merthyr Tydfil are all important places in our story; but Lancashire was undoubtedly s
pecial.

  In 1835 Edward Baines, author of History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, first outlined the region’s natural geographical advantages: rivers to provide water power, coal for steam engines, connection to the port of Liverpool, soft water, a damp atmosphere ideal for spinning fine cotton, and easy access to sources of iron and chemicals. Lancashire had a tradition of cotton production dating back to 1600, and the cotton industry had remained relatively free of regulation.

  In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries certain English towns were designated wool towns and production outside those towns, within their counties, was prohibited. However, four northern counties which were known for their coarse cloth were allowed to produce in rural districts with few restrictions on the number of looms. In the 1530s, in an attempt to boost linen production, the state ruled that every landowner with more than sixty acres in tillage must give over a quarter of an acre to flax or hemp. Lancashire certainly took advantage of these measures and became known for coarse woollen cloth and for fustians produced in villages and cottages throughout the county. By the time of Defoe’s travels to the region in the 1720s, cotton was being made in Manchester, Bolton, Bury, Blackburn, Middleton, Chadderton and Hollinwood near Oldham.

  By the 1740s and 50s, according to parish registers, over half the adult males in Lancashire derived most of their income from textiles. The upland areas of Lancashire and West Yorkshire were traditional sheep-rearing country and the poor soil encouraged textile production to supplement farming income; in Rossendale there were as many weavers as farmers before industrialisation. By the mid-eighteenth century, putting-out had become a highly developed system in south Lancashire; spinners and weavers knew how to operate, manage, repair and often build their looms, waterwheels, spinning wheels and hoists.

  The region also had a highly developed watchmaking trade, which was supplemented by a strong tradition of clockmaking, hinge-, nail- and lock-making in and around the Warrington area; this tradition of skilled engineering was crucial to Lancashire’s later development. In addition south Lancashire and Cheshire were already beginning to develop the chemical industry that was to grow so prodigiously around Widnes, Runcorn and the Mersey Valley. As chemicals were essential to textile production, the industry boomed on the coat-tails of the cotton phenomenon.

  So south Lancashire was a small self-contained industrial economy, and at a time when land transport was cumbersome, John Aikin found a good system of turnpike roads, enabling horses, carriages and wagons to travel at speed, allowing more goods to be carried more quickly. The Bridgewater canal had opened in 1761, and further extensions had linked the heart of Manchester to the Mersey and the canal to the Mersey–Trent system, thus allowing access both to the seaport of Liverpool and the industrial areas of the Midlands. The Leeds to Liverpool canal began carrying traffic in 1774, passing through Lancashire’s industrial heartlands. Primarily built to transport coal from Worsley to Manchester, by 1791 the Bridgewater canal was carrying around £20,000 worth of coal and £30,000 of other goods, as well as accruing £3,800 in passenger fares. Traffic through Liverpool also increased dramatically: 1,317 vessels paid duties of roughly £2,300 in 1757; by 1770 the number of ships had risen to 2,100 and duties paid to £4,150; by 1800 this had risen again, with 4,700 vessels paying a total of £23,400.7

  The improved transport infrastructure in this small region enabled people to travel easily in search of work, business partners, premises, materials and markets. As we have seen, Richard Arkwright regularly travelled from his base in Bolton for his original business of wig-making and made crucial contacts in Warrington, Leigh and Preston. But better transport also allowed the evolution of a sophisticated and changing relationship between Manchester and the nearby towns. In the putting-out system merchants based themselves in the market towns, with individual spinners and weavers working in the surrounding countryside – 3,000 in the Blackburn area, for example. With the introduction of new workplaces, either fully powered mills or joint working in converted buildings, production moved from the countryside into the market towns and even to the edges of Manchester town centre – in Ancoats and along Oxford Road – where the merchants now also based themselves as almost every clothier was now within reach of the Manchester market. The satellite towns of south Lancashire thus became production bases rather than independent markets, and while Rochdale, Bolton, Blackburn and Burnley were factory or mill towns, with the majority of their workers and investments going into cotton production, Manchester was predominantly a trading city.

  By the 1780s, when the first factories began to appear on the fringes of the town centre, Manchester’s major streets were already lined with warehouses, and over the next decades they spread outwards to form the commercial heart of the city, from St Anne’s Square to Market Street and along Mosley Street to Princess Street. On Cannon Street in 1815 there were fifty-seven warehouses containing premises for 106 firms trading and producing cotton. Over the same period the number of steam-powered spinning mills in Manchester and Salford increased from just one (owned by Richard Arkwright at Shudehill) to eighty-six. The factories were concentrated to the east of the centre in Ancoats, where the enormous mills of the Murray brothers and McConnel & Kennedy sat among densely packed jerry-built housing, with more on the western fringe of the city along Oxford Road. This industrial zone was expanded outwards to the east and north and through Salford in the following decades while the city centre remained a commercial trading zone.8

  The warehouses in the heart of the city were not simply used for bulk storage, but for displaying wares – by the early nineteenth century the whole world came to Manchester to buy its cloth, including Nathan Rothschild, who established a textile business there before moving to London.9 Samuel Bamford worked as a warehouse assistant on Cannon Street around 1810 and his job was to carry cloth pieces up to the first-floor salesroom where they would be spread out on the floor on a white cloth. As he recalled: ‘A scramble then commenced among the buyers, which should get the most pieces; sometime they have met me at the sale door and tore them off my back; and many a good coat have I seen slit up, or left with the laps dangling, after a struggle of that sort.’10 While the warehouses brought in money through sales, the cotton factories provided work for the tens of thousands who flocked to the city: by 1815 the city’s factories employed 11,500 workers and by 1841 nearly 20,000. McConnel & Kennedy, established in 1797, moved to a new eight-storey mill in Ancoats in 1818; the mill employed 1,545 people and was the wonder of the age.

  However, while cotton was its lifeblood, any image of a city stuffed with smoky factories and little else would be misguided. In fact this ultra-modern city was in some ways a reinvention of the great mercantile centres of old: for the wharves of Venice, Smyrna and Amsterdam, read the warehouses of Cannon Street and Mosley Street; for the craft workshops of Lyons, Leipzig, Florence and Toledo, read the great mills of Ancoats but also the small makers of the Medlock district. This heady mix of the mercantile and the industrial, the commercial and the manufacturing, needed a vast array of people to service its needs, from street cleaners to doctors, publicans to judges, and engineers to waggoners. In 1841, for example, only 18 per cent of the town’s workforce was directly employed in cotton production and sale, compared to 50 per cent in Ashton and 40 per cent in Oldham and Blackburn. The city’s growth and wealth was driven by the cotton industry, and by the promise of work that it held out to any who cared to go and find it, but Manchester also showed the world how a modern city had to develop a supporting infrastructure in order to function effectively.

  The physical network of south Lancashire also produced a series of social networks. In their travels around the region and within, Manchester traders, merchants, entrepreneurs and inventors were liable to get to know one another and develop common interests. Textile workers with an eye to furthering their prospects could see every aspect of the industry all around them; many were quick to learn and to set up their own workshops or small manufacto
ries, perhaps specialising in machine repair or a particular kind of finishing or dyeing. At the same time the proximity of so many producing centres provided the right combination of solidarity and competition – mill-owners knew they had to innovate to keep ahead of their rivals, or at least keep up with the latest devices and processes.

  The great textile inventions originated in Lancashire because the skills in spinning, weaving and machine-making were there, and because the inventions were rapidly adopted (sometimes unscrupulously) by the Lancashire industry. The jenny and the mule were both quickly taken on and continuously improved: when James Hargreaves fled to Nottingham his jenny stayed in Lancashire and flourished, while in Derbyshire Richard Arkwright was a sole innovator whose work was assiduously exploited in his native county. (Lewis Paul’s spinning mills in Birmingham and Northampton were left to wither: had he set up in Manchester or Bolton, the story may well have been quite different.) Then when Arkwright’s patents were overturned in 1785, the way was open for all cotton spinners to make spinning frames and mules; and Lancashire engineers piled in with improvements, culminating in the 1825 self-acting mule made by Richard Roberts, a Welsh engineer who had set up business in Manchester.

  Manchester’s singular political history contributed to the peculiar combination of commercial free-for-all and radicalism that came to characterise the city. Before it became a municipal borough in 1838 Manchester was run as a medieval manor with a Court Leet, complete with a reeve and two constables – all voluntary – and a paid deputy constable. The parishes within the old manor looked after the roads, collected rates and gave out poor relief. An Act of 1792 established Police and Improvement commissioners who looked after night policing, street paving and lighting, cleaning and refuse collection.