er
inventors in Lancashire should not be repeated in his case. He here
collected about him a number of friends, moneyed and otherwise, who
helped in his evolution of spinning machinery.

A man named John Smalley of Preston found him the wherewithal to carry
on his experiments first at Preston and later on at Nottingham.
Certainly what he put up at Nottingham gave such promise of practical
utility, that two experienced business men were led to join him in
partnership, and the three of them, Need, Strutt, and Arkwright, very
soon had mills built in Nottingham, Cromford and Matlock. The
first-named mill was worked by horses, the two latter by water, hence
the common name of _water frame_, given to the machines of Arkwright.

The gentlemen taken into partnership were able and qualified to give
good sound advice and help to Arkwright, and about the middle of the
year 1769 he took out a patent for his "_water frame_."

To use his own words, in his specification he "had, by great study and
long application, invented a new piece of machinery, never before found
out, practised or used, for the making of weft or yarn from cotton,
flax, and wool; which would be of great utility to a great many
manufacturers, as well as to His Majesty's subjects in general, by
employing a great many poor people in working the said machinery, and by
making the said weft or yarn much superior in quality to any heretofore
manufactured or made."

No useful purpose could be served by reproducing Arkwright's description
of the machine in question, but a picture of the actual machine is
shown in Fig. 22.

Image: FIG. 22.--Arkwright's machine (after Baines).

The most important feature of the invention, of course, was the drawing
out or attenuating of the cotton by rollers revolving at different
speeds. But it was also essential that proper mechanism should be
provided by which twist would be put into the yarn to make it
sufficiently strong; and furthermore, it was necessary to arrange for
the attenuated and twisted cotton to be automatically guided and coiled
up or wound up into a convenient form. As we have seen, the drawing out
of the cotton finer he accomplished by the Drawing Rollers originally
invented by Lewis Paul, while for the latter purpose he successfully
adapted the principle already existing in the Saxony wheel, used in the
linen manufacture, with which he probably became acquainted during his
residence at Preston.

It should not be