Edmund Cartwright was an English clergyman exemplifying the 18th-century ‘‘universal man,’’ or a person who simultaneously excelled in diverse fields. He was one of three successful brothers of a prominent Nottinghamshire family. His brother John was elected to Parliament while George was an army officer and explorer who first brought Eskimos to England. Edmund was educated at University College, Oxford, became a fellow at Magdalen College, and later obtained a Lincoln Cathedral prebend or church position. He also received critical acclaim (including from Sir Walter Scott) for his poem Armine and Elvira and successfully cured several parishioners of typhus by dousing them in yeast, a procedure adopted by many 18th-century physicians.
An unintended encounter led the curate Edmund Cartwright to become an important figure in the production of cloth. During the summer of 1784, Cartwright met in Manchester several men who were engaged in a discussion of Richard Arkwright’s spinning machines. The conversation emphasized that once Arkwright’s patent had elapsed, so many new mills would appear that there would not be enough people available to weave the cotton that would certainly be produced. Cartwright suggested that Arkwright might be wise to devise a weaving mill, a comment that his companions apparently scoffed at as being impractical to automate.
Cartwright took the challenge to heart. Although he had never set eyes upon a handloom or even thought about such a mechanical apparatus, upon his return home he set about constructing a powered model of the handloom. Perhaps he relied on knowledge given to him about the Indian method of slinging warp threads over the branch of a tree or he recalled a drawing of a Greek machine in an early 18th-century text at Oxford. Nonetheless, he secured his first patent in April 1785. Cartwright’s original loom was primitive and required two men to power the device. In the next three years he worked tirelessly to improve his invention and secured additional patents. By 1788 his power loom also rolled the cloth off the loom and could detect a broken thread.
Despite his inventive spirit, Cartwright was neither a savvy industrialist nor a shrewd businessman. He was also the victim of those persons who feared the changing times. In 1785 he established a factory at Doncaster to house his looms. However, this facility never became more than a testing site for his inventive efforts. By 1790 he had sold a license to Robert Grimshaw to construct up to 500 new looms. Soon public distrust arose, especially about his efforts to apply steam power to the looms. A factory intended to house the looms burnt down after the installation of the first twenty-four, most certainly the work of handloom weavers who feared for their livelihood if this new contraption took root. Threatening letters appeared frequently, and he abandoned his project as he faced bankruptcy. Indeed, other manufacturers, also afraid of the backlash, failed to purchase Cartwright’s machinery. By 1793 his family came to his aid and sold their estate at Marnham to settle his debts.
Faced with this opposition and disappointment, Cartwright dabbled in a few other inventions. He designed a wool-combing device that would do the work of twenty men. Cartwright developed interlocking construction bricks and floorboards of incombustible materials. Each of his effort resulted in financial disappointment and practical opposition. He attempted to interest Robert Fulton in a modified Watt steam engine that increased power by one-third, but the latter had settled on the Watt-Boulton engine at the urging of his business partner Robert R. Livingston, the U. S. Ambassador to France. In subsequent years Fulton denied accusations that he had pirated Cartwright’s plans and claimed them as his own.
Cartwright’s disillusionment led him to accept the Duke of Bedford’s offer to manage a farm at Woburn. As well as serving as the Duke’s chaplain, he worked for seven years on experimental farming techniques, winning a medal from the Board of Agriculture in 1805 for an essay on artificial manures. Cartwright thought that his attempts at inventing mechanical devices had totaled 30,000 pounds and included his family estate at Marnham. However, in recognition of his ingenuity and lifetime achievements, a group of well-to-do cotton manufacturers, including Sir Robert Peel, persuaded the English government to award him a stipend of 10,000 pounds. This sum allowed him to leave his Woburn position and retire to a small farm in Kent.
Edmund Cartwright obtained the sobriquet ‘‘The British Archimedes’’ in song. He was in many respects a man ahead of his times. His efforts to construct and market the power loom anticipated the developments following the end of Richard Arkwright’s patents—a power loom operated by horses, water wheel, or steam engine. However, breaking the bottleneck of power sources and bias proved too much for him. In the quarter century following his invention, only 2,400 power looms were in operation in the entire country. No shortage of handlooms or their operators existed, and coal remained expensive. Another sixty years passed before the pendulum would swing in the direction that Cartwright had envisioned in the 1780s. Cartwright spent his last years comfortably but never lost his desire to construct machines. His last project was a device that would be powered by explosives, perhaps the first hint of the internal combustion engine.
World History
