d
time know all there was to be known of the mechanism used by Hargreaves
in his new method of spinning.

Later on, Arkwright became acquainted with a man named Highs of Leigh,
another experimenter in spinning. The circle of his acquaintanceship
also included Kay, a clockmaker of Warrington, who had assisted Highs on
several occasions in his investigations.

At this time Arkwright's all-absorbing hobby was mechanics, and first
one experiment and then another was made in rapid succession. Needless
to say, his business of barbering suffered in the meanwhile.

From the first he turned his attention to an improvement of spinning
cotton by drawing rollers. His efforts were crowned with success, and he
ultimately blossomed into a knight, and was elected High Sheriff of
Derbyshire. It is rather singular that he should be about the only one
of the cotton-machinery inventors of this age who amassed a fortune;
most of the others being but slightly removed from want in their last
days.

There were many who claimed that they were the real and original
inventors of this method of spinning by rollers, but there can be no
doubt that to Arkwright alone belongs the credit for bringing these
improvements to a higher state of perfection than they ever attained
before.

At the present time, roller drawing is the great basis of the operations
of modern spinning, wherever performed.

Not only is this the case in the final stages of production, but it is
especially true of most of the preparatory processes, whether used for
the production of coarse, medium or fine yarns.

As is well known, the great principle of drawing rollers is, that the
cotton is passed through three or four pairs of rollers in quick
succession, and attenuated by each pair in turn, each pair being made to
revolve more quickly than the preceding pair. This identical process is
repeated in machine after machine, until finally the bulk of cotton is
reduced to a fine thread, of which, in some cases, it takes two or three
hundred miles to weigh _one pound_. Even in what are termed medium
numbers or counts of cotton yarn, there are from fifteen to twenty-five
miles of thread in a pound avoirdupois, and more than _a thousand
million pounds_ of such yarns are spun annually.

The year 1767 found Arkwright entirely absorbed in his ideas of roller
drawing, and he got the clockmaker Kay to journey with him to
Nottingham, possibly thinking that what had been meted out to oth