its entrance: the steam turbine, which sends its awful
energy, transformed into electric current, to light a million lamps or
to turn ten thousand wheels on distant streets and highways.

CHAPTER IV. SPINDLE, LOOM, AND NEEDLE IN NEW ENGLAND

The major steps in the manufacture of clothes are four: first to
harvest and clean the fiber or wool; second, to card it and spin it into
threads; third, to weave the threads into cloth; and, finally to fashion
and sew the cloth into clothes. We have already seen the influence
of Eli Whitney's cotton gin on the first process, and the series of
inventions for spinning and weaving, which so profoundly changed the
textile industry in Great Britain, has been mentioned. It will be the
business of this chapter to tell how spinning and weaving machinery was
introduced into the United States and how a Yankee inventor laid the
keystone of the arch of clothing machinery by his invention of the
sewing machine.

Great Britain was determined to keep to herself the industrial secrets
she had gained. According to the economic beliefs of the eighteenth
century, which gave place but slowly to the doctrines of Adam Smith,
monopoly rather than cheap production was the road to success. The
laws therefore forbade the export of English machinery or drawings
and specifications by which machines might be constructed in other
countries. Some men saw a vast prosperity for Great Britain, if only the
mystery might be preserved.

Meanwhile the stories of what these machines could do excited envy in
other countries, where men desired to share in the industrial gains.
And, even before Eli Whitney's cotton gin came to provide an abundant
supply of raw material, some Americans were struggling to improve the
old hand loom, found in every house, and to make some sort of a spinning
machine to replace the spinning wheel by which one thread at a time was
laboriously spun.

East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was the scene of one of the earliest
of these experiments. There in 1786 two Scotchmen, who claimed to
understand Arkwright's mechanism, were employed to make spinning
machines, and about the same time another attempt was made at Beverly.
In both instances the experiments were encouraged by the State and
assisted with grants of money. The machines, operated by horse power,
were crude, and the product was irregular and unsatisfactory. Then
three men at Providence, Rhode Island, using drawings of the Beverly
ma