Slater, Samuel

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Samuel Slater

Born June 9, 1768

Belper, England

Died April 20, 1835

Webster, Rhode Island

Industrialist who brought secret designs of early textile machinery to the United States

"I understand you have taught us how to spin."

U.S. president Andrew Jackson, who called Slater "father of American manufactures"

W hen Samuel Slater landed in the United States in 1789, he brought with him detailed plans to make automated machinery used to spin yarn from cotton, equipment that was a key element in launching the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The Industrial Revolution is the historical process of replacing traditional hand-crafted methods of manufacturing with complex machinery using energy sources besides muscle power, such as steam engines or waterwheels. Slater did not pack the plans in his baggage, which would have violated English law. He brought the designs in his head. After years of working with industrial equipment in England, he had memorized the thousands of details of how the machines worked. The United States at the time was eager to build textile factories similar to the ones that were changing the face of the British economy. Slater became known as the father of the American Industrial Revolution, and he started a string of successful textile factories in New England.

Growing up in England

Samuel Slater was born on a farm near the town of Belper, England. His father, William Slater, was a prosperous farmer who also bought and sold land to make money. In the early 1880s, William Slater sold a piece of land that included a stream running through it to Jedediah Strutt (1726–1797), a prominent business owner. Strutt planned to build a factory on Slater's land, taking advantage of the rushing water to propel a waterwheel and thereby provide power to automated textile manufacturing equipment. Strutt was an early pioneer in the establishment of new factories that housed machinery capable of doing the work of skilled craftsmen, but much faster and with fewer people. The process of substituting machines for human hands, called the Industrial Revolution, was initially concentrated in the textile industry. One set of new machines spun cotton fibers into yarn or thread; another set wove the yarn into fabric. Strutt was a partner of Richard Arkwright (1732–1792), who had invented a yarn-spinning machine that used a waterwheel pushed by a stream of water to generate the motion of the machine. Buildings that housed water-powered machines, along with the machinery inside, were called mills.

As part of the arrangement to sell his land, William Slater arranged for his son Samuel to be employed in the new factory as an apprentice, a young person who is learning the business, for the standard term of seven years. Strutt had originally wanted another son of Slater as an apprentice, but eventually chose Samuel because of the boy's ability in arithmetic. At age fourteen, Samuel Slater started working full-time, learning all aspects of the textile business—how the machinery worked, how to manage workers, and how to sell the finished products. His apprenticeship was highly successful. Slater was a clever student and became a top assistant to Strutt, even living in his boss's house. As a young man, Slater was not only put in charge of building and maintaining machinery at other mills owned by Strutt and Arkwright but was also expected to deal with the employees who worked at the mill. By the time he was twenty, Slater had a thorough knowledge of how to build and operate a textile mill.

Bringing his secrets to the United States

As successful as he was, at the end of his apprenticeship, when he was twenty-one, Slater concluded that the textile industry had a limited future in England, since men like Strutt and Arkwright had already set up dozens of factories. He worried that there were so many textile mills built in England that the industry would become overcrowded and lead to company failures. At the same time, businessmen in the newly independent United States were offering rewards for people who would bring the secrets of how to build the new factories across the Atlantic as well as employment offers for the people with skills to run them. Having already seen the business advantages of the new factories, American investors, or people with money to spend building businesses, wanted to establish American factories that could compete with those being built in England.

But importing a factory to the United States was not easily done. In an effort to preserve the advantages of industrialization for England, the British government had declared it illegal to export the industrial machines like Arkwright's or for skilled workers like Slater to leave the country with the secrets of industrialization in their heads.

Having decided that he had a more promising future in the United States than in England, in 1789 Samuel Slater secretly made plans to cross the Atlantic. To avoid the ban on skilled workers leaving England, he did not even tell his mother that he intended to immigrate to the United States. Dressing as a farmer to disguise himself, and hiding the certificate he had received as an apprentice, Slater boarded a ship bound for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

After arrival in the United States, Slater made his way to New York City where he got a job at the New York Manufacturing Company, a small textile mill. But Slater was disappointed with the company's poor equipment and its lack of a location near running water. So when he heard that Moses Brown (1738–1836), a Quaker businessman in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, near Providence, and his partner William Almy (1761–1836) were experimenting with textile machinery, Slater went to visit Brown. Almy and Brown had built a textile mill but could not get it working properly. Slater quickly identified how the equipment could be improved and offered to work for Brown and Almy. For three months, Slater made improvements to the installed machinery to make it more like the equipment designed by Arkwright. The results were so satisfactory that Brown and Almy offered to make Slater a partner in their business.

The initial spinning mill set up by Slater was a tiny operation, run by Slater and a staff of nine children between ages seven and twelve. Despite its small size, no one doubted the success of the operation, and in 1793 Slater, Brown, and Almy built a larger textile mill in Pawtucket. That factory, called Slater's Mill, was the first of several mills that Slater would eventually construct and own in New England.

Success in New England

New England made an ideal location for mills like Slater's. The region had many streams that could drive water-wheels. The streams fed into rivers that led to port cities on the Atlantic, where ships could deliver raw materials and carry off the finished goods to growing markets in big cities up and down the East Coast of the United States. At the same time, factory owners found a source of employees on New England farms. The region's rocky soil made farming difficult, and many farmers and their families were willing to exchange a life of agriculture for a life working in a factory.

One of Slater's major contributions to early American industry, aside from bringing knowledge of how to build the machinery, was his method of organizing workers, which later became known as the Rhode Island System. In his system, in addition to a factory, or mill, Slater also built housing for the workers within a short walk of their jobs. Slater provided

stores that sold food and every other necessity for the workers. Wages were paid in the form of credit at the store, helping save cash for the investors in the factory. Slater also built churches and schools near the mills; in both church and school, lessons were taught with the approval of Slater—lessons that helped reinforce attitudes among workers that contributed to the mill's success, as Slater saw it.

The Rhode Island System put into the mill owner's hands virtually every detail of the workers' lives: the hours they worked, the physical conditions inside the factory, the pay levels. When workers were hard to find, Slater and other factory owners improved conditions to make work more attractive; when there were many workers available, conditions tended to decline. Nevertheless, in the years when Slater and other pioneers in American industry were building the early mills, the standard of living usually improved for people who left their small farms to work in a mill, which is not to say that factory life was easy. Work in the factory started before sunrise and ended after sunset. The machines created dust from the cotton fibers, which could lead to respiratory diseases. The mills were cold in the winter, hot in the summer. Air conditioning was unheard of. The rapidly moving machines posed a potential danger to fingers and hands.

Expansion

Slater's partnership with Brown and Almy did not last. Slater's business strategy was to specialize in manufacturing thread and yarn; Brown and Almy wanted to incorporate the entire range of operations, from spinning yarn to weaving cloth. Because of their disagreement, Slater broke with his partners and built his own mill across the river in 1797. He rented rooms from Oziel Wilkinson (1744–1815), and later married his daughter Hannah. Wilkinson and two of his wife's brothers became new partners with Slater, and together they constructed the mill town of Slatersville, Rhode Island. In 1806, Slater's brother John (1776–1843) arrived from England, bringing with him a variety of tools not available in the United States (as well as seeds for garden plants not available in New England), and joined his brother's business. By 1807, Slatersville was the largest mill town in New England, but it was so compact that workers seldom had to travel more than a quarter mile to get from their factory housing to their jobs, the store, or church.

The father of the American Industrial Revolution

In his career, Slater was a partner in, or founder of, thirteen textile mills, making him one of the most successful businessmen in early American history. Not only did he help transfer English technology to the United States; he also developed business and management ideas that became important in the success of U.S. industry throughout the nineteenth century. His early desire to specialize in one aspect of the textile business, spinning thread, was paralleled by his development of specialization of work inside his mills.

Slater's life illustrated one of the most important contributions that he and other immigrants made to the growing United States: ideas. In the case of Slater, it was the idea of how to build an advanced factory to spin cotton into thread, as well as ideas about employing whole families in the mills. As a result, the United States eventually began to compete with (and eventually overtook) England in manufacturing using the techniques and equipment of the Industrial Revolution.

Although Slater may be celebrated as an American hero for introducing manufacturing technology to the United States just a decade after independence from Britain, he is regarded by some as a thief. England and the United States both had laws protecting inventors from having their ideas stolen, and there is little doubt that Slater reproduced the idea of Arkwright's spinning machines without paying anything. Had he reproduced equipment invented inside the United States, Slater could have been fined for violating a patent, an exclusive right to benefit from an idea for a designated period of time. But U.S. patent laws only protected inventions created in the United States; stealing an idea from Britain and bringing it across the ocean was considered fair game in the late eighteenth century.

Slater died in 1835 with an estate valued at over $1 million at the time (the equivalent of about $17 million in the twenty-first century).

—James L. Outman

For More Information

Books

Cameron, Edward H. Samuel Slater, Father of the American Manufactures. Freeport, ME: B. Wheelwright Co., 1960.

Loeb, Robert H. New England Village: Everyday Life in 1810. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.

Tucker, Barbara. Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790–1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984.

White, George. Memoir of Samuel Slater, the Father of American Manufactures; Connected with the History of the Rise and Progress of the Cotton Manufacture in England and America. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1967.

Periodicals

Gustaitis, Joseph. "Samuel Slater: Father of the Industrial Revolution." American History Illustrated (May 1989): p. 32.

"The Memory of Samuel Slater." Yankee (August 1999): p. 108.

Tucker, Barbara M. "The Merchant, the Manufacturer, and the Factory Manager: The Case of Samuel Slater." Business History Review (Autumn 1981): p. 297.