Thus was invented the machinery of the cotton mill; but there remains to be considered the one other contrivance without which the vast extension of manufactures would have been impossible and the manufacturing towns, which we are about to consider, would never have attained the size and importance which enabled them to become factors in the political life of England. I refer to the steam engine. In 1763, James Watt was employed in repairing a model of Newcomen’s steam engine, and, noting certain basic defects, undertook to remedy them. He perceived the vast possibilities of a properly constructed engine and, after years of patient labor he gave to the world the mighty power of steam. Previous to this time, and indeed until the year 1782, the steam engine had been used almost exclusively to pump water out of mines, but with Watt’s improvements it became possible for the engine to give rotary motion to machinery. The first cotton mill to install a steam engine made by Boulton and Watt was the one owned by the Messrs. Robinson in Nottinghamshire—this was about the year 1785. Two years earlier, Arkwright had made use of an atmospheric engine in his Manchester factory, but it was not until 1789 that an improved steam engine was set up in that city and it was a year later when Arkwright adopted the device. The invention of spinning-machinery created the cotton manufacture of England, but the industry would never have reached the proportions which it presently did except for the genius of Watt. IV THE FACTORY SYSTEM When the cotton manufacture was in its infancy, all the operations, from dressing the raw material to folding the finished fabric, were completed under the roof of the weaver’s cottage. With Arkwright’s invention it became the custom to spin the yarn in factories and weave it by hand in cottages. With the invention of the power loom, it again became the practice to perform all the processes in a single building. The weaver’s cottage, then, with its rude apparatus of peg warping, hand cards, spinning-wheels, and wooden looms, was the steam factory in miniature; but the amount of labor performed in a single factory was as great as that which formerly gave occupation to the inhabitants of an entire district. A good hand-loom weaver could produce two pieces of shirtings each week; by 1823, a power-loom weaver produced seven such pieces in the same time.