History of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain: with a notice of its early history in the East, and in all the quarters of the globe ... and a view of the present state of the manufacture / By Edward Baines, jun.

  • Baines, Edward, Sir, 1800-1890.
Date:
[1835]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: History of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain: with a notice of its early history in the East, and in all the quarters of the globe ... and a view of the present state of the manufacture / By Edward Baines, jun. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    167/606 (page 145)
    liis patent. He never publicly laid claim to tlie inven- tion till 1785/* eighteen years after he is said to have made the machine. He never shewed the model made for him by Kay, in proof of his being the inventor. No witness but Kay speaks to his having made such a machine. No document attests it. Dr. Aikin and Mr. Guest are the only authors who assert it.f Kay, the only witness besides Highs himself, had quarrelled with and quitted Arkwright, and was therefore pre- judiced against him; to say nothing of the charge of felony, as to the truth of which there is no •/ evidence. Such a case is far from satisfactory. It is possible that the imperfect invention of Highs included the prin- ciples of the water-frame ; but if so, it is remarkable that the evidence of it should be so scanty and defective. When it is considered, too, how many projects have floated through the brains or perished in the hands of inventors, we naturally require strong proof in support of Highs’s claims to this important invention. Still there is some evidence, which it is difficult to dispose of. The case becomes more perplexed when it is remem- bered that a machine on the same principle as that * Highs and Kay were, however, in attendance at a previous trial in 1781, when Arkwright brought an action against colonel Mordaunt for the invasion of his patent; but they were not called upon to give evidence, the plaintiff being defeated on another ground. See Mr. Erskine’s statement on the trial in 1785.—Trial, p.G6. t Dr. Aikin appears to have taken his account from the evidence of Highs and Kay on the trial. Highs’s claim is not mentioned by Mr. Kennedy, by Mr. Dugald Bannatyne, author of the able article on the “ Cotton Manufacture” in the Supple- ment to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or by the author of the article on the same subject in Rees’s Encyclopaedia; and it is strenuously controverted by Mr. M^ulloch in his article on the “ Rise, Progress, Present State, and Prospects of the British Cotton Manufacture,” in No. 91 of the Edinburgh Review. T