In 1768, Arkwright, having completed the model of a machine for spinning cotton thread, removed to Preston, taking Kay with him. At this time he had hardly a penny in the world, and was almost in rags. His poverty, indeed, was such, that soon after his arrival in Preston, a contested election for a member of Parliament having taken place, he was so tattered and miserable in his appearance, that the party with whom he voted had to give him a decent suit of clothes before he could be seen at the polling-booth. He had got leave to set up his machine in the dwelling-house attached to the Free Grammar School; but, afraid of suffering from the hostility of the spinners, as the unfortunate Hargreaves had done some time before, he and Kay thought it best to leave Lancashire, and try their fortune in Nottingham. Poor and friendless, it may easily be supposed that Arkwright found it a hard matter to get any one to back him in a speculation which people then regarded as hazardous, if not illusory. He got a few pounds from one of the bankers in the town; but that was soon spent, and further advances were refused. Nothing daunted, Arkwright tried elsewhere for help, and at length succeeded in convincing Messrs. Need and Strutt,[A] large stocking-weavers in the place, of the value of his invention, and inducing them to enter into partnership with him. In 1769 he took out a patent for the machine, as its inventor, and a mill, worked by horse-power, was erected for spinning cotton by the new machine. Two years after, he and his partner set up another mill in Derbyshire, worked by a water-wheel; and in 1775 he took out another patent for some improvements on his original scheme. The machinery which he patented consisted of a number of different contrivances; but the chief of these, and the one which he particularly claimed entirely as his own invention (for he frankly admitted that some of the other parts were only developments of other inventors), was what is called the water-frame throstle for drawing out the cotton from a coarse to a finer and harder twisted thread, and so rendering it fit to be used for the warp, or longitudinal threads of the cloth, which were formed of linen, as well as the weft. This apparatus was a combination of the carding and spinning machinery; and the principle of having two pairs of rollers, one revolving faster than the other, was now for the first time applied to machinery.