PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Samuel Slater: Part 2

After a 66-day voyage, Slater arrived in New York and got a job with the New York Manufacturing Company – a flax-spinning mill. 

Slater was very disappointed both with the machinery and the lack of water power and wrote to Moses Brown, a rich Quaker merchant, who had provided most of the capital for another spinning firm, Almy and Brown, at Providence, Rhode Island, requesting a job. 

It was perfect timing, since Brown had been struggling to get the spinning machinery working and operational in this new mill and so immediately offered Slater the job of mill manager – which he also immediately accepted.

Slater was able to get some production started and Brown, being a shrewd businessman, quickly realised that Slater was a clever bloke and rather than have him leave, tied him into a new partnership with his son Obadiah, his cousin Smith Brown and his son-in-law William Almy.

This was also what the ambitious Slater most likely wanted as well – since he had deceptively let Brown believe that he had actually worked for Arkwright in England rather than simply working with Arkwright machines.

One of his first acts as partner was to condemn the quality of the Brown machinery and demand that they construct a new mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and install new machinery, to his designs, in it.

Using only his memory he designed and organised the manufacture of two perfect clones of Arkwright spinning frames - with a total of 72 spindles and some carding and roving machines.

On 20 December 1790, less than 16-months after leaving London, the mill commenced production with a men-operated tread mill – since the final waterwheel had not yet been fully completed and installed – and nine local children who would be trained as spinners.   Local women cleaned the cotton before the carding operations.

Again, the timing was perfect, as the first crop of cotton from the deep south plantations had been harvested a few months before.

Shortly after the mill opened, Slater married Hannah Wilkinson who was the inventor of sewing cotton and the first American woman patentee.

Things now started to move quickly with the Pawtucket mill not only using British designed machinery but also implementing British management techniques as well.  Demand for cotton was such that a second mill was built and went into operation in July 1793 (Old Slater Mill with a further 72-spindles)  and then in 1797 Slater, having arguments within the partnership, started a new company, Samuel Slater and Company, and built for himself the White Mill in Massachusetts which was completed in 1801.  However, he was careful to still maintain his interests in the original mills.

Yet more industrial espionage and trade secret theft followed, this time perpetrated by Samuel’s brother John, which it was incorporated into the new mill, and together they built the mill village of Slaterville on the Branch River.

Shortly after Slater’s wife Hannah died, he re-married a wealthy Philadelphian widow Esther Parkinson.

Samuel Slater died 21 April 1835, still owning all or part of 13 textile mills and was worth around $1,000,000.  He is buried Mount Zion Cemetery, Webster, Massachusetts.

Back in Belper, and most of Derbyshire, he was known for a long time as “Slater the Traitor” for a long time, since he had stolen Arkwright’s technology but now, with the world textile industries having moved on again to Asian countries, Belper and Pawtucket are twin towns.

Ironically, just after Slater left for America, the English courts declared Arkwright’s patent invalid for lack of specificity and it also that Arkwright had misappropriated the inventions of others when he filed his patent application.

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