Richard Arkwright, industrial pioneer
Richard Arkwright, described as the "father of the modern industrial factory system," was born on December 23rd, 1732. Without formal schooling, he was taught to read and write by his cousin, then apprenticed to a barber. He was inventive from the beginning, creasing a new waterproof dye for the then-fashionable wigs.
He created a spinning frame to mechanize the thread-making by using wood and metal cylinders to replace people's fingers. It was initially powered by horses, and with a partner, Arkwright started up a horse-drawn factory at Nottingham. He took on investors from the stocking industry to set up the world's first water-powered textile mill at Cromford, employing 200 people to perform both carding and spinning. His new carding machine made thin, strong cotton thread to feed what were now called Arkwright's water frames.
His insight was to realize that mass-produced yarn could be made by applying external power, initially water, to semi-skilled labour operating machines. He was very much an entrepreneur as well an inventor, setting up a series of water mills across the Easy Midlands. He built cottages near his Cromford mill to accommodate the weavers and their families he attracted, employing whole families, including children, in his factories.
He also pioneered the use of steam power, using a steam engine at Wirksworth to refill the mill pond used to drive the water wheel that powered his machines. He employed thousands of people, and helped shape the early industrialized North of England, as well as helping to set up mills at Lanarkshire in Scotland. He was not popular. His attempt to secure a "grand patent" on his processes was rejected after dragging on for years, and one of his mills was destroyed in the anti-machinery riots of 1779. He was knighted for his work, however, and left a huge fortune of half a million pounds when he died.
Like the other pioneers of England's Industrial Revolution, he was breaking new ground. He changed the face of England, and then the world. Previous generations had looked forward to doing what their parents had done, but now, because of men like Arkwright, each generation would have to live in a world completely different from that of its predecessors.
His innovations caused upset as his machines made traditional crafts obsolete. His factories broke the closed shop of guilds and apprenticeships that had enabled craftsmen to fix prices. His methods produced cheap and affordable yarns that brought to ordinary people what had previously been affordable only to the well-to-do.
The system that he pioneered created wealth on an undreamed of scale, and lifted first England, then the world, out of the subsistence and starvation of a rural economy, and onto the upward path to create the resources that would later pay for sanitation and medicine, and then for education.
There are scholarships in his name that fund hundred of students to achieve the qualifications for university entrance and apprenticeships, especially in engineering. But his real memorial is the modern world itself, the world he entered as a pioneer and an innovator, and helped to shape.