a flashing
suddenly from the brain of a single genius and effecting a rapid
revolution in a trade. No one of the inventions which were greatest in
their effect, the jenny, the water-frame, the mule, the power-loom,
was in the main attributable to the effort or ability of a single man;
each represented in its successful shape the addition of many
successive increments of discovery; in most cases the successful
invention was the slightly superior survivor of many similar attempts.
"The present spinning machinery which we now use is supposed to be a
compound of about eight hundred inventions. The present carding
machinery is a compound of about sixty patents."[74] This is the
history of most inventions. The pressure of industrial circumstances
direct the intelligence of many minds towards the comprehension of
some single central point of difficulty, the common knowledge of the
age induces many to reach similar solutions: that solution which is
slightly better adapted to the facts or "grasps the skirts of happy
chance" comes out victorious, and the inventor, purveyor, or, in some
cases, the robber is crowned as a great inventive genius. It is the
neglect of these considerations which gives a false interpretation to
the annals of industrial invention by giving an irregular and
catastrophic appearance to the working of a force which is in its
inner pressure much more regular than in its outward expression. The
earlier increments of a great industrial invention make no figure in
the annals of history because they do not pay, and the final increment
which reaches the paying-point gets all the credit, though the
inherent importance and the inventive genius of the earlier attempts
may have been as great or greater.

There is nothing fortuitous or mysterious in inventive energy.
Necessity is its mother, which simply means that it moves along the
line of least resistance. Men like Kay, Hargreaves, Arkwright,
Cartwright, set their intelligence and industry to meet the several
difficulties as they arose. Nearly all the great textile inventors
were practical men, most of them operatives immersed in the details of
their craft, brought face to face continually with some definite
difficulty to be overcome, some particular economy desirable to make.
Brooding upon these concrete facts, trying first one thing then
another, learning from the attempts and failures made by other
practical men, and improving upon these attempts, they have at l