chinery, made machines having thirty-two spindles which worked
indifferently. The attempt to run them by water power failed, and they
were sold to Moses Brown of Pawtucket, who with his partner, William
Almy, had mustered an army of hand-loom weavers in 1790, large enough to
produce nearly eight thousand yards of cloth in that year. Brown's need
of spinning machinery, to provide his weavers with yarn, was very great;
but these machines he had bought would not run, and in 1790 there was
not a single successful power-spinner in the United States.

Meanwhile Benjamin Franklin had come home, and the Pennsylvania Society
for the Encouragement of Manufactures and Useful Arts was offering
prizes for inventions to improve the textile industry. And in Milford,
England, was a young man named Samuel Slater, who, on hearing that
inventive genius was munificently rewarded in America, decided to
migrate to that country. Slater at the age of fourteen had been
apprenticed to Jedediah Strutt, a partner of Arkwright. He had served
both in the counting-house and the mill and had had every opportunity to
learn the whole business.

Soon after attaining his majority, he landed in New York, November,
1789, and found employment. From New York he wrote to Moses Brown of
Pawtucket, offering his services, and that old Quaker, though not giving
him much encouragement, invited him to Pawtucket to see whether he could
run the spindles which Brown had bought from the men of Providence. "If
thou canst do what thou sayest," wrote Brown, "I invite thee to come to
Rhode Island."

Arriving in Pawtucket in January, 1790, Slater pronounced the machines
worthless, but convinced Almy and Brown that he knew his business, and
they took him into partnership. He had no drawings or models of the
English machinery, except such as were in his head, but he proceeded to
build machines, doing much of the work himself. On December 20, 1790, he
had ready carding, drawing, and roving machines and seventy-two spindles
in two frames. The water-wheel of an old fulling mill furnished the
power--and the machinery ran.

Here then was the birth of the spinning industry in the United States.
The "Old Factory," as it was to be called for nearly a hundred years,
was built at Pawtucket in 1793. Five years later Slater and others built
a second mill, and in 1806, after Slater had brought out his brother
to share his prosperity, he built another. Workmen came to work for
him solel