Paul-Wyatt cotton mills

The Paul-Wyatt cotton mills were the world's first mechanised cotton spinning factories. Operating from 1741 until 1764 they were built to house the roller spinning machinery invented by Lewis Paul and John Wyatt. They were not very profitable but they span cotton successfully for several decades.

In 1738 Lewis Paul and John Wyatt obtained a patent for a cotton spinning machine that for the first time used the principle of two sets of rollers travelling at different speeds to enable fully mechanical spinning. The patent outlined the two key developments that were later to underlie both Richard Arkwright's water frame and James Hargreaves' spinning jenny, and made it possible for a single power source to drive more than one spinning machine. Wyatt envisaged "a kind of mill, with wheels turned either by horses, water or wind."

Using this technology, and with financial support provided by associates of the author Samuel Johnson, in the summer of 1741 Paul and Wyatt set up the Upper Priory Cotton Mill in Birmingham, the first mill to spin cotton "without the aid of human fingers". The mill "containing fifty rollers ... turned by two donkeys walking round an axis" was not a commercial success, with Wyatt unable to enforce the levels of organisation and discipline that an operation on this scale demanded; Andrew Ure was to comment that Wyatt was "favourably placed, in a mechanical point of view, for maturing his admirable scheme" but "a gentle and passive spirit, little qualified to cope with the hardships of a new manufacturing enterprise". Two years after its opening the mill was described as being in a "pitiful state" and in 1743 Wyatt was incarcerated in the Fleet Prison for debt. Matthew Boulton was later to observe that the Paul-Wyatt mill "would have got money had it been in good hands", but nothing is known of it after Wyatt's release in October 1743.

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