Thomas Highs Totally Explained

Everything about Thomas Highs totally explained

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.

Life and work

Thomas Highs was born in Leigh, Lancashire in 1718 and lived most of his life there. On 23 February, 1747 he married Sarah Moss at the Leigh Parish Church. Five years after his marriage, he became interested in cotton-spinning machinery and started to experiment with Lewis Paul and John Wyatt's (of Birmingham) drafting rollers which he'd later try to perfect with the help of John Kay, a clockmaker from Warrington, Lancashire.
   Behind locked doors, Highs and Kay laboured for months, ignoring the taunts of their neighbours, but eventually became so frustrated that one Sunday evening, they opened the garret window of Highs's house and tossed the machinery out into the back yard. Kay went home dejected. Next morning Highs had second thoughts, gathered up the bits and reassembled them. Eventually, in 1764, he produced a machine which didn't involve rollers. This he christened the Spinning Jenny after his daughter Jane (according to his neighbour, Thomas Leather). However, although Highs made and sold several Jennies he never perfected the device and passed it on to James Hargreaves.
   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.
   Now, enter the villain, in the shape of the demon barber, Richard Arkwright. 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. Highs was undone.
   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 he died in 1803.
   In 1775 Arkwright patented a variety of machinery that performed all the processes of manufacture, from cleaning to carding to final spinning. Every one of these patented ideas he stole from others.
   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.
   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.
   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'd 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.
   Whatever the truth, there's 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.

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