Chapter One Slater’s Mill Samuel Slater was a young textile mill manager from Derbyshire England In 1789 he boarded a boat and left for the United States At the time British law did not allow skilled craftsmen to leave the country In order to leave Slater disguised himself as a farmer He sailed from London to New York where he hoped to use his skills and knowledge Britain did not want other countries to learn British technology Men such as Slater knew that their knowledge would be very valuable in other parts of the world In North America few people knew how to build and operate such machinery Slater hoped to make his fortune helping build a U S textile industry He had been an apprentice to a man who built machinery for textile mills He had learned everything about constructing and operating this Samuel Slater’s textile mill in Pawtucket Rhode Island was the first built in the United States ﱚ5ﱚ
The First Mill Until the 1790s Great Britain was the only place in the world where yarn was spun using water powered mills That changed when Samuel Slater built the first U S cotton mill in Pawtucket Rhode Island in 1790 By 1849 there were more than 123,000 mills and factories in the United States machinery He had even memorized how to build the mills on which he had worked When Slater arrived in New York he began working for a factory He built parts for spinning jennies which were large spinning wheels Samuel Slater learned about textile mills in Great Britain before coming to the United States ﱚ6ﱚ
same time The spinning jenny allowed one person to spin thread on many spindles at the that produced yarn Soon he saw a newspaper advertisement for a different job Two Rhode Island men were seeking someone who could run yarn-spinning equipment Slater contacted the men William Almy and Moses Brown The three soon became partners Slater started building a water-powered cotton mill on the Blackstone River in Pawtucket Rhode Island Working from memory he built the same type of spinning mill he worked on in England In late 1790 the mill was up and running At first ﱚ7ﱚ
