This enterprise was remarkable in more than the engineering difficulties overcome. Several canals had already been made in various parts of the country by deepening and straightening the channels of streams and rivers, and the first ship canal was that constructed in 1566, on the Exe, from Topsham to Exeter; but the Bridgewater Canal was the first to be dug in dry ground. Its extension across country, to the Mersey at Runcorn, was undertaken for the purpose of cheapening and expediting traffic in raw and manufactured cotton and other goods, between Manchester and Liverpool, and was thus the precursor, by a hundred and twenty years, of the Manchester Ship Canal, which aims to make Manchester a port entirely independent of its great seaboard neighbour.
The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a great turning-point in Manchester’s history. One invention rapidly succeeded another; most of them by local men, for among the sprack-witted Lancashire folk there has ever been plenty of mechanical genius. At the time when Hargreaves was planning his spinning jenny, another was perfecting a similar machine. This was Richard Arkwright, of Preston, the youngest of a poor family of thirteen children, who was born in 1732, and began life as a barber and dealer in hair at Bolton. In 1768 his cotton-spinning machine, which performed the work of sixteen or twenty men, was set up at Preston, and in 1707 was patented. His first spinning-mill was erected at Cromford, Derbyshire, in 1771, and was entirely successful. In 1786 he was knighted, and in 1792 he died, leaving a fortune of close upon half a million sterling.
The fickleness and waywardness of fortune are proverbial, but nowhere else so marked as in the struggles of inventors. In 1779, eleven years after Arkwright had set up his spinning-jenny, Samuel Crompton, of Hall-i’-th’-Wood, near Bolton, invented the hybrid “Spinning Mule,” combining the useful features of Hargreaves’ and Arkwright’s machines. He was an exceptionally poor man, and partly earned his living by playing the violin at the Bolton theatre.
A great step forward was Cartwright’s power-loom, invented in 1785, and the Government in 1809 granted him £10,000, in recognition of his usefulness to the advancement of commerce. With the same year that witnessed Cartwright’s invention, steam was first employed in weaving, by Boulton and Watt, and the history of the cotton industry has been, since that day, a long record of improvements, until nowadays factories are equipped with the most beautiful and complicated contrivances—the outcome of a hundred and seventy years of invention—that seem themselves almost sentient and understanding.