ABSTRACT
In this "Case," Mr. Arkwright, with all the assurance imaginable, roundly asserts that he invented the Water Frame, or Roller Spinning, in 1768-what effrontery!—Mr. Arkwright was NOT the inventor, as is demonstrable from the documents in the Appendix. His "great mechanical abilities" consisted solely in having cunning enough to pump a secret out of a silly, loquacious clockmaker, and in having sense enough to know when he saw a good invention. When we read in Mr. Arkwright's Case of "his inventions and his machinery "being pilfered from him by artful and designing individuals," we cannot help feeling sorry for him ; but when we find that "his inventions" were all pirated from others, and that one of them (the crank and comb) "was cruelly wrested "from poor Hargrave," or, in other words,stolen from the man whose hard case he so feelingly deplores, we see the true bent of Mr. Arkwright's "natural genius "and unbounded invention," and feel emotions of a very different description from those he wished to excite. When Mr. Arkwright complains that "by the "seduction of his servants and workmen, a knowledge of his machinery was gained," we are forcibly reminded of the manner in which he procured the model of Highs' Water Frame; and when he says, "the persons employed by "the artful and designing individuals were sworn to secresy," he brings to our recollection the bond he himself took from Kay.
