Dennis Williams
Gone but not forgotten
A sad tale with a twist.
Chapter 1: The Not So Good News
Around 1750, in a warehouse in Upper Priory, John Wyatt worked on an invention that eventually sent him to a debtor’s prison, but was later to earn a knighthood and a fortune for Richard Arkwright. The invention? The Spinning Machine.
Born in 1700 at Weeford, near Lichfield, the eldest of eight brothers and a relative of Dr Johnson’s mother Sara Ford, John Wyatt was a carpenter by trade, but around 1730 he first attracted attention outside Weeford when attempting to develop a machine for “cutting files”.
A Birmingham gunsmith, Richard Heeley, advanced money against ownership of the completed machine, but lost his rights when he ran out of cash. Enter a Mr Lewis Paul of London who stepped in to rescue the project, only for him to suffer the same fate; and within a year the machine rights reverted back to Wyatt once more, and the idea for the cutting machine finally withered on the vine when he went into serious debt, and consequently prison, trying desperately to finish the project.
Next came his ill-fated spinning machine. Initially in the mill shed at New Forge (Powells) Pool, Sutton Coldfield, and later in a workshop in Upper Priory, Wyatt spun the first thread of cotton yarn ever produced by mechanical means when he elongated cotton threads by running them through rollers and then stretching them through a faster second set of rollers with the help of two donkeys walking round an axis. Sound like a plan?
Unfortunately the patent for the spinning machine was in the name of Wyatt’s old partner, Lewis Paul, who, not heeding the old adage ‘once bitten twice shy’, and presumably still having faith in Wyatt’s ingenuity, if not his ability to deliver the finished article; dredged up more cash from the Duke of Shrewsbury to finance this newer device. But, like most creative souls, having no personal financial interest in this machine once it became a working model, Wyatt left Paul to it, and went off to take employment with Matthew Boulton.
The rest is history, unfortunately for him, as Richard Arkwright developed it further and became rich and famous for his trouble. There is a rumour he was once heard to say Me transmitte sursum, caledoni! – (Beam me up, Scotty!)
Chapter 1: The Not So Good News
Around 1750, in a warehouse in Upper Priory, John Wyatt worked on an invention that eventually sent him to a debtor’s prison, but was later to earn a knighthood and a fortune for Richard Arkwright. The invention? The Spinning Machine.
Born in 1700 at Weeford, near Lichfield, the eldest of eight brothers and a relative of Dr Johnson’s mother Sara Ford, John Wyatt was a carpenter by trade, but around 1730 he first attracted attention outside Weeford when attempting to develop a machine for “cutting files”.
A Birmingham gunsmith, Richard Heeley, advanced money against ownership of the completed machine, but lost his rights when he ran out of cash. Enter a Mr Lewis Paul of London who stepped in to rescue the project, only for him to suffer the same fate; and within a year the machine rights reverted back to Wyatt once more, and the idea for the cutting machine finally withered on the vine when he went into serious debt, and consequently prison, trying desperately to finish the project.
Next came his ill-fated spinning machine. Initially in the mill shed at New Forge (Powells) Pool, Sutton Coldfield, and later in a workshop in Upper Priory, Wyatt spun the first thread of cotton yarn ever produced by mechanical means when he elongated cotton threads by running them through rollers and then stretching them through a faster second set of rollers with the help of two donkeys walking round an axis. Sound like a plan?
Unfortunately the patent for the spinning machine was in the name of Wyatt’s old partner, Lewis Paul, who, not heeding the old adage ‘once bitten twice shy’, and presumably still having faith in Wyatt’s ingenuity, if not his ability to deliver the finished article; dredged up more cash from the Duke of Shrewsbury to finance this newer device. But, like most creative souls, having no personal financial interest in this machine once it became a working model, Wyatt left Paul to it, and went off to take employment with Matthew Boulton.
The rest is history, unfortunately for him, as Richard Arkwright developed it further and became rich and famous for his trouble. There is a rumour he was once heard to say Me transmitte sursum, caledoni! – (Beam me up, Scotty!)