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Thomas Highs (1718 – 1803) was a talented English reed-maker and inventor known for his creation of the spinning jenny, the throstle (a machine for the continuous twisting and winding of wool), and the water frame during the Industrial Revolution.
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Life and work
Thomas Highs was born in Leigh, Lancashire in 1718 and lived most of his life there. It is said he was a talented reed maker – a reed being a comb-like strip attached to the batten of a loom, which kept the warp threads apart and helped the weaver to pack the weft threads tight on the newly-woven cloth. He married Sarah Moss on 23 February 1747, at the Leigh Parish Church. Five years after his marriage, he became interested in cotton-spinning machinery and started to experiment with the drafting rollers patented by Lewis Paul and John Wyatt, which he would later try to perfect with the help of John Kay, a clockmaker from Warrington, Lancashire.1
Highs and Kay laboured for months, and eventually, in 1764, produced a machine which did not involve rollers which they called the "spinning jenny". Highs neighbour, Thomas Leather, swore on oath that Highs named the machine after his daughter Jane, although other possible reasons for the name have been suggested. One possibility is that "Jenny" is a corruption of 'engine', as in Whitney's cotton gin. The other is that the word is an allusion to the name for a female ass, a beast of burden that would relieve a man of some of his work. The argument for the latter is strengthened by the fact that that the machine Samuel Crompton later developed by combining the spinning jenny and the water frame was called a spinning mule.1 However, although Highs made and sold several jennies he never perfected the device and passed it on to another inventor, James Hargreaves.2
Highs knew the Jenny's limitations. It could produce only thread that was suitable for weft. Its output was too soft to be used for warp, which still had to be manufactured from linen. While Hargreaves worked on the spinning jenny, Highs at last managed to perfect a machine using rollers. A machine later to be called the water frame. Whereas the Jenny had stretched the thread by trapping it in a sort of wooden vice and pulling it out, the Water Frame achieved better results by passing the roving through two sets of gripping rollers. The second set were rotating at five times the speed of the first, so the thread was stretched to exactly five times its original length, before being given its vital twist by a bobbin and flyer. The machine produced stronger thread than the Jenny. Thread that was suitable for warp.
Highs gave clockmaker Kay a wooden model of his brainchild and asked him to make a working metal version. Kay did so prior to returning to live a few miles away in his native Warrington.
Richard Arkwright met Kay on his business travels, gained his confidence, and over a drink in a pub persuaded him to hand over the secrets of Highs's machines. Arkwright, later Sir Richard Arkwright, developed a substantial fortune and reputation in the cotton industry from Highs's inventions, while Highs lived the rest of his life in obscurity before his death in 1803.3
In 1775 Arkwright patented a variety of machinery that performed all the processes of manufacture, from cleaning to carding to final spinning. In 1781, Arkwright went to court to protect his patents but the move rebounded when his patents were overturned. Four years later, after seeing his patents restored temporarily, the truth finally came out in another, definitive court battle.citation needed Highs, Kay, Kay's wife and the widow of James Hargreaves all testified that Arkwright had stolen their inventions. The court agreed: Arkwright's patents were finally laid aside.3
There is still one final twist to the story and it links Highs the third and possibly the greatest of the 18th-century's spinning inventions, the spinning mule. The accepted story is that Samuel Crompton of Bolton invented the spinning mule, which was a cross between the spinning jenny and the water frame, using the moving-carriage principle and the spindle-winding system of the earlier machine with the drafting rollers of the later one. Crompton claimed he had no knowledge of Arkwright's rollers and came upon the idea independently between 1772, when he began work, and 1779. It is known, however, that Highs - one of the very few men with intimate knowledge of both Jenny and Water Frame - lived in Bolton during that times, and was, in fact, a member of the same, tightly-knit Swedenborgian religious sect as Crompton.citation needed
Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that Thomas Highs was a man of genius, robbed of credit, wealth and his rightful place in history by Richard Arkwright, who, in spite of being discredited, still dominates the story of cotton.
References
Notes
- ^ a b see Peacock, Doug, Thomas Highs and his spinning machines, Cotton Times, http://www.cottontimes.co.uk/highs.htm Retrieved on 3 September 2006.
- ^ Making History, programme 10, BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/making_history/making_history_spring2003.shtml. Retrieved on 29 October 2006.
- ^ a b Rise of the factory system: Richard Arkwright, Making the Modern World, The Science Museum, http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/stories/manufacture_by_machine/01.ST.01/?scene=5&tv=true. Retrieved on 3 September 2006.
Bibliography
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| NAME | Highs, Thomas |
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| SHORT DESCRIPTION | |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1718 |
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| DATE OF DEATH | 1803 |
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- This page was last modified on 28 October 2008, at 14:48.
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