Living in the midst of a manufacturing population, Arkwright was accustomed to hear daily complaints of the continual difficulty of procuring sufficient weft to keep the looms employed; while the exportation of cotton goods gave rise to a growing demand for the manufactured article. The weavers generally had the weft they used spun for them by their wives or daughters; and those whose families could not supply the necessary quantity, had their spinning done by their neighbours; and even by paying, as they had to do, more for the spinning than the price allowed by their masters, very few could procure weft enough to keep themselves constantly at work. It was no uncommon thing, we learn, for a weaver to walk three or four miles in a morning, and call on five or six spinners, before he could collect weft to serve him for the rest of the day. Arkwright must have been constantly hearing of this difficulty, and of the restrictions it placed on the manufacture of cotton goods; and being a mechanical genius, was led to think how it might be lessened, if not got rid of altogether. The idea of having an automaton spinner, instead of one of flesh and blood, had occurred before then to more than one speculator; but the thing had never answered, and no models or descriptions of the machines proposed were preserved. One inventor had, indeed, destroyed his own machine, after having constructed it and found it to work, for fear that if it came into use it would deprive the poor spinners of their livelihood,--in reality its effect would have been to provide employment and food for thousands more than at that time got a miserable living from their spinning-wheels. While Arkwright was intent on the discovery of perpetual motion, he fell in with a clockmaker of the name of Kay, who assisted him in making wheels and springs for the contrivance he was trying to complete. This led to an intimate connection between them; and when Arkwright had given up the perpetual motion affair, and applied his thoughts to the invention of some machine for producing cotton weft more rapidly than by the simple wheel, Kay continued to help him in making models. Arkwright soon became so engrossed in his new task, and so confident of ultimate success, that he began to neglect his regular business. All his thoughts, and nearly all his time, were given up to the great work he had taken in hand. His trade fell off; he spent all his savings in purchasing materials for models, and getting them put together, and he fell into very distressed circumstances. His wife remonstrated with him, but in vain; and one day, in a rage at what she considered the cause of all their privations, she smashed some of his models on the floor. Such an outrage was more than Arkwright could bear, and they separated.