Upper Priory Cotton Mill
Encyclopedia
The Upper Priory Cotton Mill, opened in Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...

, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 in the summer of 1741, was the world's first cotton mill
Cotton mill
A cotton mill is a factory that houses spinning and weaving machinery. Typically built between 1775 and 1930, mills spun cotton which was an important product during the Industrial Revolution....

. Established by Lewis Paul
Lewis Paul
Lewis Paul was the original inventor of roller spinning, the basis of the water frame for spinning cotton in a cotton mill.-Life and work:Lewis Paul was of Huguenot descent. His father was physician to Lord Shaftesbury...

 and John Wyatt
John Wyatt (inventor)
John Wyatt , an English inventor, was born near Lichfield and was related to Sarah Ford, Doctor Johnson's mother. A carpenter by trade he began work in Birmingham on the development of a spinning machine...

 in a former warehouse in the Upper Priory, near Paul's house in Old Square
Old Square, Birmingham
Old Square is a public square and road junction in the Core area of Birmingham City Centre, England.-Prior to construction:The site of the square was formerly occupied the Priory of St Thomas of Canterbury, with The Minories, Upper Priory and Lower Priory being the original entrance roads to the...

, it used the roller spinning machinery that they had developed and that had been patented by Paul in 1738, that for the first time enabled the spinning
Spinning (textiles)
Spinning is a major industry. It is part of the textile manufacturing process where three types of fibre are converted into yarn, then fabric, then textiles. The textiles are then fabricated into clothes or other artifacts. There are three industrial processes available to spin yarn, and a...

 of cotton
Cotton
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective capsule, around the seeds of cotton plants of the genus Gossypium. The fiber is almost pure cellulose. The botanical purpose of cotton fiber is to aid in seed dispersal....

 "without the aid of human fingers". Wyatt had realised that this machinery would enable several machines to be powered from a single source of power: forseeing the development of the factory system, he envisaged "a kind of mill, with wheels turned either by horses, water or wind."

History

Finance for the Upper Priory enterprise came from Paul himself; from Thomas Warren
Thomas Warren
Thomas Warren was an English bookseller, printer, publisher and businessman.Warren was an influential figure in Birmingham at a time when it was a hotbed of creative activity, opening a bookshop in High Street, Birmingham around 1727...

, the Birmingham bookseller and newspaper publisher; Edward Cave
Edward Cave
Edward Cave was an English printer, editor and publisher. In The Gentleman's Magazine he created the first general-interest "magazine" in the modern sense....

, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

-based publisher of the The Gentleman's Magazine
The Gentleman's Magazine
The Gentleman's Magazine was founded in London, England, by Edward Cave in January 1731. It ran uninterrupted for almost 200 years, until 1922. It was the first to use the term "magazine" for a periodical...

; and Robert James
Robert James (physician)
Robert James was an English physician who is best known as the author of A Medicinal Dictionary, as the inventor of a popular "fever powder", and as a friend of Samuel Johnson.-Life:...

, a notable physician
Physician
A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...

 and inventor of a well-known "fever powder". The latter three were friends of the author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...

, who had lived in Birmingham during the 1730s and whose family had been connected to that of Wyatt in Lichfield
Lichfield
Lichfield is a cathedral city, civil parish and district in Staffordshire, England. One of eight civil parishes with city status in England, Lichfield is situated roughly north of Birmingham...

, and Johnson may have been responsible for introducing them to Paul.

The mill consisted of fifty spindles, turned by "two asses walking around an axis" and was tended initially by ten women. Contemporary observers make it clear that the machine was fundamentally effective, and hopes for the venture were initially very high. James wrote to Warren in July 1740: "Yesterday we went to see Mr. Paul's machine, which gave us all entire satisfaction both in regard to the carding and spinning. You have nothing to do but to get a purchaser for your grant; the sight of the thing is demonstration enough. I am certain that if Paul could begin with £10,000 he must or at least might get more money in twenty years than the City of London is worth." By 1743, however, the Upper Priory Mill was almost derelict.

Wyatt, who had assisted with the setting up of the mill, had offered to oversee its operation from December 1741, but was imprisoned for debt in the Fleet Prison
Fleet Prison
Fleet Prison was a notorious London prison by the side of the Fleet River in London. The prison was built in 1197 and was in use until 1844. It was demolished in 1846.- History :...

 in June 1742. A letter written to Wyatt during this period suggests the mill was badly mismanaged in his absence: "I think there's not one ass left alive, so what's done is only done by hand. There's not a man left at the work, but one Mr Rodgers an old man that came down from London when he could stay no longer, and he I find can't get money to live upon and almost starved...." Wyatt tried to gain orders for yarn from the mill when he was released in October 1743 but there is no record of the mill beyond this point, though it may have been the machinery from the Upper Priory that Wyatt sent to Northampton in 1757.

A key weak point of Paul and Wyatt's machinery was its frailty, which saw it frequently out of order and in need of expensive repairs. It has also been suggested that the inability of Paul or Wyatt to organise a manufacturing operation with the necessary level of discipline and supervision may have been a key reason for the mill's failure. Andrew Ure
Andrew Ure
Andrew Ure was a Scottish doctor, scholar and chemist.-Biography:Andrew Ure was born in Glasgow, the son of Alexander Ure, a cheesemonger and his wife, Anne. He received an M.D. from Glasgow University in 1801, and served briefly as an army surgeon before settling in Glasgow, where he became a...

 wrote that Wyatt was "favourably placed, in a mechanical point of view, for maturing his admirable scheme. But he was a gentle and passive spirit, little qualified to cope with the hardships of a new manufacturing enterprise. It required, in fact, a man of a Napoleon nerve and ambition, to subdue the refractory tempers of work-people accustomed to irregular paroxysms of diligence." Matthew Boulton
Matthew Boulton
Matthew Boulton, FRS was an English manufacturer and business partner of Scottish engineer James Watt. In the final quarter of the 18th century the partnership installed hundreds of Boulton & Watt steam engines, which were a great advance on the state of the art, making possible the...

, whose own Soho Manufactory
Soho Manufactory
The Soho Manufactory was an early factory which pioneered mass production on the assembly line principle, in Soho, Smethwick, England, during the Industrial Revolution.-Beginnings:...

 successfully organised industrial production on an unprecedented scale from the 1760s onwards, was later to recall the Paul-Wyatt mill as a "a good Cotton spinning mill" that "would have got money had it been in good hands".

Despite the commercial failure of Paul and Wyatt's own factory, further mills were established using their machinery in Northampton
Northampton
Northampton is a large market town and local government district in the East Midlands region of England. Situated about north-west of London and around south-east of Birmingham, Northampton lies on the River Nene and is the county town of Northamptonshire. The demonym of Northampton is...

 and Leominster
Leominster
Leominster is a market town in Herefordshire, England, located approximately north of the city of Hereford and south of Ludlow, at...

, and a second mill established in Birmingham, which remained in operation at least until the mid 1750s.
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