III MECHANICAL INVEN A TIONS DISTINCTION should be made between the factory and the factory system. The latter was not new to England, having been employed during the Roman occupation; and with the introduction of the woolen industry under Edward III, we again find the factory system established on an extensive scale. John Winchcombe, commonly called Jack of Newbury, who died about the year 1520, made use of the factory system on a very extensive scale. In Fuller's Worthies you may read how he "was the most considerable clothier without fancy or fiction England ever beheld," and how "his looms were his lands, whereof he kept one hundred in his house, each managed by a man and a boy." Jack of Newbury was celebrated in a metrical romance, and the following lines taken from it contain an interesting description of his famous industrial establish ment. "Within one room, being large and long, Sat making quills with mickle joy. Were carding hard with joyful cheer Then to another room came they The number was seven score and ten And these were sheer men every one, A dyehouse likewise he had then Full twenty persons kept he still.” Here, indeed, we have the factory system-in which the division of labor is a conspicuous feature — employed with all its modern details; but not the steam-driven factory, building great cities and changing the whole social life of the kingdom. a The original mode of converting cotton into yarn was by the use of distaff and spindle, method still employed in the remote parts of India. The distaff is a wooden rod to which a bundle of cotton is tied loosely at one end, and which the spinner holds between the left arm and the body while with his right hand he draws out and twists the cotton into a thread. This simple process is the basis of all the complicated spinning machinery in use at the present time. In a modern cotton factory there are three departments of labor, carding, spinning, and weaving; and we have now to consider briefly these three processes. The purpose of carding is to clean the cotton and lay the fibres in a uniform direction. This was at first accomplished by hand, the implement employed being little different from an ordinary comb; later an improved device was used consisting of a pair of large wire brushes. This, we must observe, was a primitive operation, and the amount of cotton which one person could thus prepare for spinning was very small. We have already seen that the invention of the fly-shuttle so increased the demand for that ingenious men were induced to make mechanical experiments for the purpose of supplying this demand-ex yarn periments which, in the end, led to the invention of the spinning-frame. The spinning-frame, in turn, increased the demand for carded cotton and skillful mechanics again set about to meet this new requirement, and the result was the building of the carding-engine. This invention was not made at once, nor by any particular individual; but was the result of a number of improvements made at different times and by different persons. One of these men was Thomas High, the inventor of the spinning-jenny; another was James Hargreaves who so improved the jenny that he is commonly called the inventor of it; and finally, Richard Arkwright himself took the crude machine devised by these men and perfected it. Thus it came about that the modern carding-engine as well as the spinningframe, was made of practical value by this much-enduring, much-inventing barber. The invention of the fly-shuttle, as we have seen, led to an increased demand for |