[Footnote 373: _Ante_, p. 103. This is not to suggest that if Crompton had received £200 he would have been adequately recompensed. What sum would have been adequate recompense? No one, in 1780, could have fully realised the importance of invention as only the future could reveal it. Had the subscription been considerably larger Crompton’s grievance might have been lessened though not averted.] By nature Crompton was probably a man of rather gloomy temperament. He would probably have been as happy as was possible to him, with a modest competence, living his life in a corner, but there can be little doubt that this incident accentuated what nature had endowed him with, and he brooded over the injustice to the end of his life. Moreover, it is probable that it checked the exercise of his inventive genius. Four or five years later he was experimenting with a carding-machine,[374] which, French tells us, he ultimately destroyed in the belief that it would be purloined.[375] In view of the date of the experiment one cannot help wondering whether it was carried on during the short period in 1785, when Arkwright’s patent rights were temporarily restored, and had as its object the displacement of his carding machinery. [Footnote 374: Kennedy, _ibid._, p. 321.] [Footnote 375: French, _ibid._, p. 67.] By the time these patent rights were finally annulled considerable improvements had been effected in the mule, and from about that date there followed a great extension of its use. Up to 1783 Mr. Kennedy did not think that Crompton’s machine was in use to the extent of a thousand spindles,[376] and it must be recognised that it was in a crude state of construction when it left his hands. Crompton was not a practical mechanic and his work was performed with the simplest tools. He was acquainted with the jenny, but he informed Mr. Kennedy that, when he constructed his machine, he was unacquainted with Arkwright’s rollers.[377] This may have meant, not that he had not heard of them, but that he had not seen them at work, which is not improbable, seeing that, at that time, they were only in use by Arkwright himself, and by those who had purchased the right to use them. If Crompton had neither heard of them nor seen them, it appears that he would have to be regarded as another discoverer of the roller method. The evidence is too slight, however, to allow a confident assertion on this point. Mr. Kennedy’s statement that Crompton at first used a single pair of rollers, expecting to attenuate the roving by pressure, and on the failure of this method was led to adopt a second pair, one pair revolving at a higher speed than the other, certainly suggests that he had no previous close acquaintance with the roller method.[378] Indeed, one having heard of it, but not having seen it, might well have proceeded on these lines.