[Footnote 393: Kennedy, _Rise and Progress of the Cotton Trade_, pp. 121-122, 126-129. _Report on State of Children employed in Manufactories_ (1816), p. 344.] This transition became conspicuous about 1790,[394] and at this time several men who later became noted cotton-spinners were entering the industry. It was now that Robert Owen heard “about great and extraordinary discoveries that were beginning to be introduced into Manchester for spinning cotton by new and curious machinery” and was induced to leave Satterfield’s to become a maker of mules.[395] Also John Kennedy and his partner James M‘Connel were on the point of founding the firm, among whose business material the following letters of Samuel Crompton have been discovered.[396] Enough has been said to indicate the eminence of John Kennedy in the cotton industry, and a novelist of a later day, taking as her hero a Manchester Blue-Coat apprentice in the early years of the nineteenth century, could indicate in no better way the exalted stage he had reached in his career than by allowing her readers to see him in conversation, almost as an equal, with the Manchester cotton-spinner, James M‘Connel.[397] [Footnote 394: Kennedy, _ibid._, p. 16.] [Footnote 395: _Autobiography_, p. 22.] [Footnote 396: _Economic Journal_, June, 1915.] [Footnote 397: Banks, _The Manchester Man_, ch. xxxii. The author was misinformed as to the Christian name of Mr. M‘Connel.] Both these men were members of a group of Scottish youths that migrated into Lancashire from a country district in Kirkcudbrightshire in the early eighties of the eighteenth century,[398] and they were not the only members of the group to gain prominent positions in Manchester. The brothers Adam and George Murray were equally prominent as cotton-spinners; James Kennedy, brother of John Kennedy, was scarcely less prominent as the head of another cotton-spinning concern; while a brother of James M‘Connel became manager of M‘Connel & Kennedy’s factory. If, to this group, we add Jonathan Pollard, and the Houldsworths, of whom Thomas and John were spinners in Manchester, while Henry left Manchester for Glasgow in 1799, and established a concern there, we have comprehended the principal spinners of fine yarn in the British cotton industry in the early years of the nineteenth century.[399] All these men commenced in business within a few years of each other, those of whom we have definite information having little capital, and, like Robert Owen, most of them commenced not so much as spinners as makers of cotton machinery. [Footnote 398: Kennedy, _Early Recollections_ (1849), pp. 9-10.] [Footnote 399: _Report on State of Children employed in Manufactories_, pp. 234, 244.]