Although the origin and application of inventive genius is largely independent of known laws, and may provisionally be relegated to the domain of "accident," there are certain reasons which favoured the cotton industry in the industrial race. Its concentration in South Lancashire and Staffordshire, as compared with the wide diffusion of the woollen industries, facilitated the rapid acceptance of new methods and discoveries. Moreover, the cotton industry being of later origin, and settling itself in unimportant villages and towns, had escaped the influence of official regulations and customs which prevailed in the woollen centres and proved serious obstacles to the introduction of new industrial methods.[71] Even in Lancashire itself official inspectors regulated the woollen trade at Manchester, Rochdale, Blackburn, and Bury.[72] The cotton industry had from the beginning been free from all these fetters. The shrewd, practical business character which marks Lancashire to-day is probably a cause as well as a result of the great industrial development of the last hundred years. Moreover, it was recognised, even before the birth of the great inventions, that cotton goods, when brought into free competition with woollen goods, could easily undersell them and supplant them in popular consumption. This knowledge held out a prospect of untold fortune to inventors who should, by the application of machinery, break through the limitations imposed upon production by the restricted number of efficient workers in some of the processes through which the cotton yarn must pass. But the stimulus which one invention afforded to another gave an accumulative power to the application of new methods. This is especially seen in the alternation of inventions in the two chief processes of spinning and weaving. Even before the invention of John Kay's Fly Shuttle, which doubled the quantity of work a weaver could do in a day, we found that spinners had great difficulties in supplying sufficient yarn to the weavers. This seems to have applied both to the Lancashire cotton and to the Yorkshire woollen manufactures. After the fly-shuttle had come into common use this pressure of demand upon the spinners was obviously increased, and the most skilful organisation of middleman-clothiers was unable to supply sufficient quantities of yarn. This economic consideration directed more and more attention to experiments in spinning machinery, and so we find that, long before the invention of the jenny and the water-frame, ingenious men like John Kay of Bury, Wyatt, Paul, and others had tried many patents for improved spinning. The great inventions of Hargreaves and Arkwright and Crompton enabled spinning to overtake and outstrip weaving and when, about 1790, steam began to be applied to considerable numbers of spinning mills, it was no longer spinning but weaving that was the limiting process in the manufacture of woollen and cotton cloths.