Water frame

3 July 1769: patent No. 931

On 3 July 1769 Richard Arkwright took out English patent No. 931 for a machine described as making weft or yarn from cotton, flax and wool. The enrolled specification survives in the UK National Archives as C 73/13 m31.

The mechanism drafted fibres through successive pairs of rollers turning at increasing speeds, then twisted and wound the resulting yarn with flyers and bobbins.

On the surviving prototype, four pairs of rollers stretched four threads at once, the final pair turning more than six times as fast as the first.

Not yet a water frame

The 1769 arrangement was intended to be driven by a horse mill. It became known as the water frame only after Arkwright applied water power at Cromford in 1771.

The patent wording covered "weft or yarn", but the Science Museum reports that the surviving prototype produced the hard, strong warp yarn a loom needs lengthwise, rather than soft weft. The claim and the demonstrated machine are not the same thing.

Whose invention it was

Arkwright was the sole named patentee. The prototype was built with the help of the Warrington clockmaker John Kay — a different man from the flying-shuttle inventor of the same name — who did not share the patent.

The roller-drawing principle had already been patented by Lewis Paul in 1738, and Thomas Highs later claimed he had devised roller-spinning machinery before Arkwright. The attribution remains contested.

What 3 July produced was a patent monopoly over the claimed machinery, running for the ordinary English term of fourteen years.