Talk:Lewis Paul

Untitled
It is most disappointing to have a long string of templates added criticising a brief article: it does not stray from its topic, which is intended not only to be about the life of Lewis Paul, but about the application of his inventions. It cites (as further reading) all the material that I have used in preparing it. If you do not like what I have written, would you kindly take the trouble to do better yourself, rather than applying inaccurate templates to it.

It is bad enough having to write the same article twice, because a vandalising admin detleted what I was doing in the middle of my editing it to expand it. However I am leaving the templates in place; it is for critics to remove these not me. Peterkingiron 18:15, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I have deleted some earlier remarks by me which are no longer relevant. I have removed the unreferenced tag because my 'further reading' was in fact references and it is now described so.  I have removed an 'off-topic' tag, as misconceived: what was missing was a subheading.  Peterkingiron 20:49, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

birth date not known
Just to save anyone else looking it up, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not list a birth date, and says that little is known about his early years. PamD (talk) 09:37, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Quarentine
I am quarentining this text here as I feel it is well written but out of place on the Cotton Mill page- 4 paragraphs about 0 mills when there are 1112 that need describing in Manchester alone!

Early cotton mills
In 1738 Lewis Paul and John Wyatt obtained a patent for a spinning machine that for the first time used the principle of two sets of rollers travelling at different speeds to enable spinning by machine. 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, Paul and Wyatt set up the first mill to spin cotton "without the aid of human fingers" at the Upper Priory in Birmingham in the summer of 1741. 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.

Four other mills were set up using the Paul-Wyatt machinery in the following years. Edward Cave – publisher of the The Gentleman's Magazine and one of the friends of Dr Johnson who had funded the development of Paul and Wyatt's invention – experimented in London with running the machinery by hand and by 1742 had set up 250 spindles in a watermill in Northampton. This was the first cotton mill to be driven by water power. Cave experienced similar problems organising his workforce to Paul and Wyatt ("I have not got half my people come to work today" he wrote to Wyatt, "and I have no great fascination in the prospect I have to put myself in the power of such people") and the mill generated little profit, but was to continue operation until about 1764. Samuel Touchet set up a second Birmingham mill in conjunction with Paul and Wyatt in 1744; little is known of its fate, but it was sufficiently encouraging for Touchet to lease the Northampton mill from Cave for a period up to 1755.

The final mill was that established by Daniel Bourn in Leominster. This may have been in operation by 1744, but is first mentioned in 1748, when both Bourn and Paul patented machinery for carding cotton - a premilinary process that must be undertaken before spinning. Bourn's mill burned down in 1754 but must have had a considerable reputation, as the Manchester Mercury's report of the fire described it as being "erected there with great expense and skill" and "viewed with great pleasure and admiration by travellers and all who had seen them" --ClemRutter (talk) 19:23, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Why are the world's first four cotton mills, including the first to be powered by water power, not suitable for discussion in the Cotton Mill article? If you want to list all 1112 cotton mills in Manchester, then why not start an article List of cotton mills in Manchester? JimmyGuano (talk) 20:27, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I think that I either wrote or substantially edited this text. The significance is that these were the first cotton mills, preceding the carding machinery of the 1760s and the water frame by decades.  The reason why they were remote from Manchester may have been the fear of opposition to the replacement of manual work by machines.  This also explains the location of some of the first worsted spinning mills (of the 1780s).  Manchester was the ultimate heartland of the cotton industry, but it was not where it started.  ClemRutter has been doing good work on tidying up textile articles, but in this case he has gone too far.  The text should be reinstated somewhere, but perhaps in a new article such as Early textile mills, where the subject can be explored without undue limitations on length.  Peterkingiron (talk) 23:17, 7 March 2009 (UTC)


 * It doesn't actually seem to have been removed from the Cotton mill article, which is good, as that article needs expanding, not pruning. It needs a lot more about Arkwright's mills in particular - Paul and Wyatt might have been the pioneers of the cotton mill, but it was Arkwright who really made the idea work.


 * This article needs improving too, but needs to focus on Paul himself, not cotton mills more generally. I'l have a go at both of these points myself, but in the meantime this text belongs firmly back in Cotton mill I think.


 * JimmyGuano (talk) 08:23, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

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