Richard Arkwright: Wig Dye Profits, Cromford Mill and a Lost 1785 Patent

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Richard Arkwright was born in Preston in 1732, the youngest of seven surviving children of a tailor, and learned to read and write from a cousin. He became a barber and wig maker in Bolton in the early 1760s, lost his first wife, Patience, a year after their 1755 marriage, and saw only one of three children with Margaret Biggins survive. A waterproof dye for periwigs funded his real ambition. Traveling to buy hair, he learned that one handloom weaver needed five or six hand spinners, and in 1768 he hired clockmaker John Kay in Preston. By 1769 they had the spinning frame, and in 1775 he patented a rotary carding engine improved from Lewis Paul's design, using rollers turning at rising speeds to draw cotton into thread.

After trials with horse power, Arkwright and hosiery investors built a water-powered mill at Cromford, Derbyshire, in 1771, adding cottages for imported families and running two 13-hour shifts. Rioters destroyed a Lancashire mill he leased in 1779, and after legal battles from 1781 a court revoked his patent in 1785, opening his methods to all. He was knighted in 1786, served as High Sheriff of Derbyshire and died at Cromford on August 3, 1792, before Willersley Castle was finished.

He hired children as young as seven, later ten, and nearly two thirds of his 1,150 workers were children.
Mill gates closed at 6 o'clock, and late workers lost a day's pay and were fined another.
His one week of annual holiday came on condition that workers not travel beyond the town.
In 1777 he installed the first steam engine used in a cotton mill, pumping water back to the mill pond.
He left an estate worth half a million pounds, more than 63 million pounds today.

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