Take a guess: who's called “The Father of the American Industrial Revolution?" If you don’t already know, you might be considering such titans as Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Samuel Morse, Eli Whitney. Every one of these is worthy of great acclaim, but none of them holds the title.
Photo: Igor Ovsyannykov
To begin with, the Father of the American Industrial Revolution was not an American. He came of age in Derbyshire, England, the son of a prosperous farmer. As did so many others at the time, he went to work in 1783 at the age of 14 as an apprentice in a textile mill owned by a man named Jedediah Strutt. This was no ordinary factory. Its machinery was as high as technology got in that day — a water-driven spinning mill designed by Richard Arkwright. This ingenious device could produce in ten minutes as much yarn as a housewife working on her spinning wheel at home would produce in 9 hours.
Birds of Prey
Arkwright had a few partners, including Strutt. They all zealously guarded the secrets of their machinery, and so they should have. To read contemporary accounts, there was an American hiding behind every tree, hoping to persuade a mill worker to spill some trade secrets. There was a lot at stake: America imported vast quantities of British yarn and cloth. The amount climbed steadily, from 356,000 yards in 1785 to more than ten times as much by 1800.
So valuable did England consider its monopoly that it forbade skilled workers, including and especially textile hands, from leaving the country. A pamphlet published in England in the mid-1790s warned “there are plenty of agents hovering like birds of prey on the banks of the Thames,” eager to persuade artisans, mechanics and others to come to America. in the U.S., fully aware of the prohibition against emigration, mill owners ran come-hither ads in English newspapers just the same, hoping to set a hook.
Englishmen were outraged. The great historian Fernand Braudel reports that William Pitt the Elder, who actually supported the Americans in the War of Independence, is supposed to have said: "if America so much as considers making a stocking or a horseshoe nail, she shall feel the full weight of British might.”
Still, it was plain as day that anyone who managed to get to America with the plans for an Arkwright spinning machine was going to make a fortune. You can see where this is going. As it happens, our Father’s Day Guest of Honor had risen to become superintendent of the Strutt mill, in which capacity he often had occasion to take apart the machines and put them back together again. And he had memorized every bobbin, lever, gear and spindle.
The Great Escape
Under cover of darkness (one would imagine) and disguised as a farmer, our man stole his way to London. He was stopped at the dock when he tried to board a ship bound for New York, but his farmer’s get-up was convincing and he hurried on board.
His name: Samuel Slater. It took him some time to get started after landing in the U.S. in 1789, but once he did, he built factories from Maine to Pennsylvania. He built a town for his workers and machines in Slatersville, Rhode Island, which still stands. Life in a cotton or woolen mill was not a Currier and Ives kind of occupation. Women and children as young as 7 labored from 6 in the morning to 7 in the evening 6 days a week, breathing in lint and dust in surroundings that William Blake called, in another country but at about the same time, “dark Satanic Mills."
The disruptive effects of the Industrial Revolution went far beyond textiles. Some of those included:
"Non-industrial wage labor increased; urban centers grew; and in farming areas, outwork occupations and commercial agriculture transformed the rural labor market. . . these economic developments coincided with dramatic changes in family life, particularly declining family size and increasing life expectancy. A greater role for women in the labor force, contemporary politics, and reform activities was certainly one of the unintended consequences of technological change in nineteenth-century America." [Women and the Early Industrial Revolution in the United States, by Thomas Dublin]
So to earn the lofty title of "Father of the American Industrial Revolution" -- supposedly from that lover of industry, Andrew Jackson, no less -- was therefore no small thing. Nor was the title he earned back home and which sticks to this day: Slater the Traitor. Leaving poetry aside, he could just as easily be called "Slater, another traitor" because larceny played an important role in what polite society might call "the diffusion of knowledge."
Patriots Among Thieves
None other than Alexander Hamilton condoned the practice of technology piracy. In this, he was joined, at least for a time, by George Washington himself, who praised the "zealous" efforts of a rather questionable fellow named Thomas Digges to help send artisans and machines "of public utility" to the United States. For the sake of earning a respectable place for their young country in the international community, Washington and Hamilton both toned down their cheerleading but they did not go further than that.
Perhaps the greatest feat of industrial piracy was that of Francis Cabot Lowell's, for whom Lowell, Massachusetts is named. He managed to travel from England to the United States in 1815 with a fairly complete set of plans for a water-powered loom. It took him no time to put the loom and the spinning machines under the same roof and the rest, you might say, is history.
Well, almost. Arkwright was distraught to have lost control of the industry that was growing all around him. He applied to the British Courts for a patent that would give him exclusive rights over the water-powered spinning machines he felt had invented. The case moved slowly. At length the petition was denied. Reaslon: it appears that years before, Arkwright had originally stolen the idea from someone else.
As for Slater, his story is much happier. In 1790, a few years before his mill started operating, the United States produced a grand total of two million pounds of cotton. By 1835, its output had increased to 80 million pounds. At the time of his death in that same year, Slater's fortune was estimated at $1.2 million, a colossal sum for the time. His success was not only enough to garner a Presidential nickname, but also to earn him a place on "The Wealthy 100," a ranking of the richest Americans ever from Benjamin Franklin to Bill Gates.*
Happy Father's Day!
* The Wealthy 100, by Michael Klepper and Robert Gunther Citadel Press, 1996.