he foot of
Charlotte Street, and had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking
upon the engine at the time, and had got as far as the herd's house,
when the idea came into my mind that as steam was an elastic body it
would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication were made between the
cylinder and an exhausted vessel it would rush into it, and might there
be condensed without cooling the cylinder. I had not walked farther
than the Golf-House when the whole thing was arranged in my mind." The
employment of a separate condenser, with the entire discarding of any
other force in its action save that of steam itself, changed the whole
conditions of the steam-engine. On the eve of the American war, in 1776,
its use passed beyond the mere draining of mines; and it was rapidly
adopted as a motive-force for all kinds of manufacturing industry.

[Sidenote: The Cotton manufactures.]

The almost unlimited supply of labour-power in the steam-engine came at
a time when the existing supply of manual labour was proving utterly
inadequate to cope with the demands of the manufacturer. This was
especially the case in textile fabrics. In its earlier stages the
manufacture of cotton had been retarded by the difficulty with which the
weavers obtained a sufficient supply of cotton yarn from the spinsters;
and this difficulty became yet greater when the invention of the
fly-shuttle enabled one weaver to do in a single day what had hitherto
been the work of two. The difficulty was solved by a Blackburn weaver,
John Hargreaves, who noticed that his wife's spindle, which had been
accidentally upset, continued to revolve in an upright position on the
floor, while the thread was still spinning in her hand. The hint led him
to connect a number of spindles with a single wheel, and thus to enable
one spinster to do the work of eight. Hargreaves's invention only
spurred the wits of a barber's assistant, Richard Arkwright, to yet
greater improvement in the construction of a machine for spinning by
rollers revolving at different rates of speed; and this in its turn was
improved and developed in the "mule" of a Bolton weaver, Samuel
Crompton. The result of these inventions was to reverse the difficulty
which hampered the trade, for the supply of yarn became so rapid and
unlimited as to outrun the power of the hand-loom weaver to consume it;
but a few years after the close of the American war this difficulty was
met by the discovery of the power-loom