Chapter 1 Slater’s Spinning Mill Samuel Slater was a young textile mill manager from Derbyshire England In 1789 he disguised himself as a farmer and secretly boarded a boat and left for the United States He sailed from London to New York where he hoped to use his skills and knowledge Britain did not want other countries to learn British technology Men such as Slater knew that their knowledge would be very valuable in other parts of the world In North America few people knew how to build and operate such machinery Slater hoped to make his fortune helping build a U S textile industry He had been an apprentice to a man who built machinery for textile mills He had learned everything about constructing and operating this machinery He had even memorized how to build the mills on which he had worked Samuel Slater’s textile mill in Pawtucket Rhode Island was the first built in the United States 5
When Slater arrived in New York he began working for a factory He built parts for spinning jennies which were large spinning wheels that produced yarn Soon he saw a newspaper advertisement for a different job Two Rhode Island men were seeking someone who could run yarn spinning equipment Slater contacted the men William Almy and Moses Brown The three soon became partners THE FIRST MILL Until the 1790s Great Britain was the only place in the world where yarn was spun using water powered mills That changed when Samuel Slater built the first U S cotton mill in Pawtucket Rhode Island in 1790 By 1849 there were more than 123,000 mills and factories in the United States Samuel Slater 1768 1835 Samuel Slater learned about textile mills in Great Britain before coming to the United States 6
The spinning jenny reduced the amount of work needed to produce yarn with a worker able to work eight or more spools at once As technology advanced as many as 120 spools could be worked at once Slater started building a water-powered cotton mill on the Blackstone River in Pawtucket Rhode Island Working from memory he built a spinning mill like the one he worked on in England 7
