THE IMPERIAL MAGAZINE.

OCTOBER, 1833.

MEMOIR OF JEDIDIAH STRUTT, ESQ.

(With a Portrait.)

Propositi tenax. "-HOR.

THE intellectual power possessed by man manifests itself most distinctly when we contemplate its exertions co-operating with the powers of nature. There are limits at which, when the products of nature have arrived, their valuable qualities remain stationary or decline, if the human intellect does not interest itself in their improvement. Urged on by his perception of future advantages, and frequently by an inexplicable attachment to the beautiful and useful, man searches out attentively the means of increasing the perfections of those plants and animals which, in his rudest state, he seized upon as his means of sustenance. The corn that now constitutes the food of man in his civilized state, differs in size and in grain from the seedy grass, which, at the earliest period, he shared with those meagre and coarse-haired brutes, that now, by cultivation, furnish our tables with delicious food, and afford us the material of warm and elegant clothing. There is not a flower, a vegetable, or a fruit, in our gardens, not a blade of grass in our fields, not an animal subservient to our necessities or our pleasures, but what excels, in an incomparable degree, the original of the species presented to man by the hand of nature; and warrants us in attributing to the human intellect a marked sympathy with the great creative power itself.

But man is not permitted to content himself with increasing and improving the rude productions of nature. The wool, the flax, the silk, and the cotton, which, by his careful attention, possess a far finer, more tenacious, and more beautiful thread, must not only be gathered in and prepared for use, but be made to constitute the filaments of a fabric subservient to the several purposes of decency or of health, of comfort or of luxury. The raw material must be adapted to the hands of the spinner, the throwster, and the weaver.

Man does not work with his hands alone. His mind points out to him what he is to do, and how he is to do it; while his bodily powers, particularly those of his arms, hands, and fingers, become the natural machinery with which he is to operate. The strong and pliant sinew, the flexible and sensitive hands and fingers, with the aid of what are now regarded as rudely contrived implements, could, however, make only a slow and painful progress towards the production of that elegance and abundance in the fabrics subservient to clothing alone, which we now find the human intellect capable of creating. And yet, when we considerately compare the raw article, the flax, the wool, or the silk, in its crude state, with the fine linen, the cloth of smooth and delicate texture, or the brocades and velvets known even to our ancestors before the improvement and almost perfection of machinery, we shall be astonished at the triumph of the 2D. SERIES, NO, 34.-VOL. III.

3 K

178.-VOL. XV.

human intellect, and perceive how the possession of these beautiful articles became more and more desirable, and how the powers of the mind, which had given them existence, were called upon to discover means of increasing their quantity.

This demand, which has been increasing in magnitude since the decline of the military feudal governments of Europe, gave rise to those inventions in machinery which excite the admiration of persons most habituated to look at them with the coolness of men of business. It is in this demand, and in our means of supplying it with such amazing facility by the creative powers of machinery, that are found all the benefits of our foreign commerce, and the multiplicity of our domestic comforts. The wines, the oils, the spices, the furs, and all the other natural products of other climates, might be made, by the abundance which issues from our machinery, almost as common as if they were the growth of our own hills and valleys, were it not for the high duties laid upon imported articles. Still, notwithstanding such restrictions on the returns due to our industry, there is no people who enjoy more of the natural products of other climates than those of Britain; and when we see the cottager's wife, at her evening's repast, sweetening the tea from China with sugar from the West Indies, and clothed in cotton which came to the looms of Lancashire or Lanark from America or Egypt, we have a proof before us, though one of the humblest, of the advantages which originate with the manufacturer, principally through the abundance to which, by means of machinery, he is able to give existence.

It was not until the last century that the service of the mechanical powers, in the production of articles of manufacture, began to be fully developed; and even that century had more than half elapsed, before the effects of the command obtained by the industry and intelligence of our British mechanists and manufactures over those powers, became perceptible in the changes which were gradually taking place in the character of our commerce. We had previously imported, on very disadvantageous terms, the fabrics of more ingenious nations, for which we exported much of our own raw produce, and even corn; or paid for them in silver received chiefly as balances, in the intermediate transactions which we carried on between other nations; but which, although it was nothing more than the wages of an active carrying trade, was regarded, by our early economists, as the only genuine sign of a lucrative commerce. It might be so at that period, because such corn was received as a return for a species of service or labour; and it was better to have such price of labour, to export for articles of foreign manufacture, than to purchase them with the raw produce of an island, which is seldom more than adequate to the supply of its inhabitants. But the spirit of industry which actuated the people of this country soon discovered, in the arts of manufacture, other means of purchasing foreign productions.

At first the raw material of our rising manufactures was almost wholly of our own growth; and, as well by the activity of our merchants as by the real goodness of the fabric, the demand became greater than the supply. The wages of labour, and the prices of the raw material necessarily increased under such circumstances, so that our capitalists and manufacturers were sometimes driven to expedients, dishonourable in themselves, and which threatened, in the apprehensions of intelligent men, the decline of our early commercial advantages. Smollet, at the conclusion of the reign of George II. tells us that the English manufacturers were intent upon discovering unjustifiable methods of reducing the price

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of labour and material, so that "many of the English manufactures, being found slight and unserviceable, grew into discredit abroad;" and, he adds, "thus the art of producing them more perfect may in time be totally lost at home the cloths now made in England are inferior in texture and fabric to those that were manufactured at the beginning of the century." The historian was not aware, that the birth of the greatest of the practical powers of mechanics was, at the time of his writing, rapidly approaching; nor could he have anticipated, by any exertion of his vivid imagination, the astonishing consequences of that birth. Undoubtedly the theory of mechanics had been long known to students and philosophers, but nature appeared not to have confided to man the means by which he could realize the beautiful and sublime, to which this theory directed his attention; and one of the philosophers of the last century (Hume) speaks of mechanics merely as a speculation" agreeable to the natural vanity and curiosity of man." But the practical power of mechanics does not seem to proceed from previous theory, although it may serve to confirm the truths at which speculative men had previously arrived. It is found emanating from the untutored perceptions of men who knew nothing of the beaten highway of knowledge, but who, having ascertained the position of the object required, found or made a way to it entirely and decidedly their own. This is a fact connected with practical mechanics, in some of the most important applications of them to the purposes of utility, as admirable in itself as in its effects upon human society; and yet it is no reproach to scientific men, that what they have mentally imagined and proved, others, unacquainted with their researches, have put into practice. Like the two sciences of pure geometry and algebra, the theorist and the practical inventor arrive, by totally dif ferent processes, at the same results; and the latter, being confirmed and emboldened by the truths demonstrated by the former, they proceed in their subsequent course together, and advance, with mutual 'confidence, towards those astonishing combinations and results, on which the happiness of mankind is so greatly dependent. Much of what was thought to be merely speculative is now known to be perfectly practicable; and the impossible in what were formerly termed the dreams of philosophers, is gradually vanishing, not merely before the imagination, but from the eye and the hand of the mechanist; while the human intellect begins to despise all the limits with which ignorance and timidity had bounded the accomplishment of its beneficial purposes.

Amongst those, by whose strong intuitive powers of mind, at the very period when Smollet considered the manufactures of this country to be verging towards their decline, the manufacturers of Britain were enabled to call to their aid the improved powers of machinery and capital, and to surpass, in an almost infinite degree, those of every nation in the civilized world, arose Mr. JEDIDIAH STRUTT. He sprang from a family which had little interest with that class of men to whom he afterwards became a distinguished ornament, and whose pursuits he, by his enlightened mind and indefatigable endeavours, at once eclipsed, and gave to them a new and more efficient direction. He was born at Normanton, (South Normanton, we believe,) in Derbyshire, some time in the year 1723, and was the second son of a farmer and maltster. The district around him was rude, and he had few means of cultivating his extraordinary mind. His father is said to have been not deficient in natural talents, but of a vulgar and severe character; insisting upon the obedience of his children, but caring little about their welfare. Under such a parent, young Jedidiah, whose mind was strong, and adhesive to its own plans, could learn little more than a firm

reliance on his own natural resources. It has been observed that there are intellects, as there are trees, that thrive best when they are least cultivated. Education is to many among the multitude, what grafting is to our fruittrees; it makes them bear finer productions than they would do of themselves, but those productions are not new, nor are they their own. Perhaps most men who, in any station of life, display that originality in either good or evil which particularly distinguishes them in their own and succeeding generations as the benefactors or the foes of their race, have owed little or nothing to education.

Jedediah, while a youth, took no bent from his father, but his firmness of resolution-his tenacity of purpose; in every thing else, his neglected, or rather unaided, mind took its own direction. He thought for himself.

Intellectual men, so circumstanced, are observed to abound with contrivances. They possess not only determination as to the end proposed, but an ingenuity with respect to the means; in which they are seen to surpass men who have been accustomed to yield to friendly dictation, or to rely upon inculcated dogmas. It is true, that unrelaxed strength of mind can alone support such men; and that, as they stand alone, they are singled out by the malevolent and the envious as objects of attack. This must be admitted by all who are conversant in the history of society. Many, thus isolated, fall; but some, by their fortitude, stand, and become, by their works, monuments of the age in which they have lived.

It must not, however, be inferred from what has been said, that Mr. Strutt was, in his youth, without those rudiments of literature and science that constitute the ground - work of education in civilized life. At what village-school the son of a farmer was taught the arts of reading and writing, or such branches of practical arithmetic as are considered sufficient for boys in his condition, it is not necessary to inquire; such instruction, though highly useful, has little influence in forming the intellectual character. But young Jedidiah did not merely read, write, and cast accounts—he thought, observed, remembered. He was attached to mechanical pursuits, and discovered of himself several methods of subjecting the lever or the wheel to any motive power, and of combining them, in order to effect operations which at once amused his youthful fancy and expanded his mind.

At the age of twenty-eight, we find him in possession of a farm at Blackwell, not many miles from the place of his birth. In the next year, he married the sister of Mr. William Woollatt, a hosier, or frame-work knitter; and this connexion brought him acquainted with the stockingframe, probably the first piece of complex machinery that he had had an opportunity of inspecting. The stocking-frame had, at that period, been invented something more than a hundred and twenty years; and, for the age in which it was produced, must be regarded as an extraordinary effort of mechanical skill. It had not, however, so much superseded the use of the domestic knitting-needles, as it had rendered stockings a more marketable article, and had so far increased the advantages of trade, and generally benefited the country. Stockings continued to be knitted by the wives and daughters of farmers; and some vestiges of that species of home manufacture amongst old ladies of villages and farm-houses still remain, though the employment is followed more for amusement than profit. Mr. Strutt saw instantly the principle on which the stocking-frame was organized, as well as those defects in that organization which frequently impeded the accuracy or neatness of its operations. He, accordingly, devoted his attention to its improvement, and the enlargement of its powers. In this he

had to contend with the prejudices of the ignorant; and it was not easy to persuade the machine-makers to adopt alterations in a machine, which, from father to son, they had been accustomed to construct in a particular manner, with very vague ideas of the principles of mechanism on which it was fabricated. Still, in opposition to repeated obstacles, he persevered, and, in less than two years, brought the knitting-frame to the highest degree of perfection of which it was then thought to be susceptible; and he added to it an invention, entirely his own, by which raised or elevated stripes, called ribs, were wrought with facility in fabricating the stockings. A patent for these improvements, and particularly for making Ribbed Cotton Stockings, was taken out by him and his brother-in-law, in the year 1756; and they removed to Derby, where they commenced business, in partnership, as hosiers.

While Mr. Strutt was enjoying the benefits of this invention, and of the other improvements he had made to the stocking-frame, and was realizing,` from that honourable source, sufficient capital to enable him to take part in a different application of the powers of machinery then about to be brought into existence, Mr. Arkwright, afterwards Sir Richard Arkwright, was seeking the means of putting into action his important invention for spinning cotton. It was not until years of perseverance had elapsed, that Mr. Arkwright, in the humble situation of itinerant barber and hair-dealer, could find patronage and capital for an undertaking, which has given to Britain a manufacture unequalled by any in the whole world, with respect to the extent of domestic and foreign traffic which it employs, the wealth it creates, and the portion of the population which it engages in its various departments. It would be a curious question, could it be ascertained, if Arkwright ever conceived even a faint idea of the immense source of individual and national wealth, the secret of which he carried about with him, year after year, amidst the many deprivations of poverty. He had undoubtedly a strong, inciting hope, blended with prudent resolution, which enabled him to persevere in his object without divulging his plan, and encouraged him to look beyond the difficulties, not only of his situation, but those obstacles that originate in the ignorance, the jealousy, and the mistrust of mankind: but magnificent as the visions of that hope may have been, they must have left him in astonishment at the realities of his own success.

Mr. Arkwright's first works were opened at Nottingham, in 1768; but they were upon a very limited scale, and required the invigorating aid of capital, when Mr. Strutt was invited to inspect them, and to take a share in the concern. That gentleman was soon convinced of the practicability and importance of the undertaking; and, with Mr. Need, who was, at that period, his partner in the hosiery business at Derby, he agreed to furnish the pecuniary means of conducting the new manufacture upon a scale adequate to the views which it opened to his expectations. Mr. Arkwright then took out a patent, and, in 1769, a mill was built, in which horses were used as the motive power. The use of horses was, however, found to be a burdensome expense to the infant concern; and, in 1771, the works were transferred to Cromford, in Derbyshire, where a mill of far more extensive dimensions was erected, the machinery of which was put into motion by a water-wheel.

The consequences of the junction of men so intelligent and persevering, were soon apparent; but, while they produced cotton threads of every requisite firmness, length, and tenacity, they suddenly met with obstacles to the sale and consumption of the article which had previously been so great a desideratum in the manufacturing community. The prejudices and