Kay J 2
Kay, John (1704–1780/81), inventor of textile manufacturing machinery, was born at Park Farm in the township of Walmersley in the parish of Bury, Lancashire, on 16 July 1704, the fifth son of Robert Kay (1651–1704) and his wife, Ellen, née Entwistle, of Quarlton. His father was a prosperous farmer who died three months before his birth and left an estate of £82 13s. 6d. John left school at the age of fourteen to be apprenticed to a maker of reeds—devices which separate the threads of a warp and beat up the weft after each shot. Reputedly he abandoned his master after one month, believing that he had learned all that he could about the art. A natural inventor, whose mechanical genius always surpassed his commercial ability, he was able and confident to excess, but fractious and quarrelsome in disposition. Anticipating a legacy of £30 when he reached the age of twenty-one, he married on 29 June 1725 Ann Holt (d. 1747); they had six sons and six daughters.
Kay's first invention was an improved reed for the loom, made perhaps in 1726, which substituted thin wire for the usual strips of cane or reed. Those wire reeds proved more durable, reduced breakages in the warp, and facilitated the weaving of finer, stronger, and more regular fabrics. They were never patented but were widely known as Kay's reeds. His first patent was taken out in 1730, for an engine for twisting reed twine. In 1733 he patented a shuttle, which was much lighter than the existing one, ran upon four wheels, and could be used for weaving woollen or linen broad-goods. Termed at first a wheel-shuttle, a spring-shuttle, or a bobbin-shuttle, it was called a fly-shuttle only in 1780 (in [D. Rasbotham], Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton Manufacture, 1780, 9).
Its significance has been misunderstood and exaggerated, especially by exponents of the heroic theory of invention, who exalted Kay as 'the father and founder of the British textile industry' (Wood, 77). A balanced assessment of its significance was eventually made by Paulinyi in 1986. The original patent described an extended sley (or batten) with at each end a shuttle box containing a spring-powered picker (or mechanical hand), together with a shuttle race-board, a picking card, and a picking peg. This design proved, however, to be imperfect, and it was improved in 1735 by the introduction of a fixed and larger spool, so making the shuttle heavier as well as longer. The patent shuttle was then introduced into the local woollen industry for which it had been devised and so became a true innovation, enabling Kay to set up in business as a shuttle maker. He sought to profit from his invention by charging an annual rent for its use but set the rental so high as to encounter inevitable resistance from his clients.
Instead of negotiating an acceptable price, Kay embarked upon the worst possible course of action and launched three successive suits in the court of chancery against some fifty-two woollen weavers of Rossendale in the years 1737, 1740, and 1743. He incurred heavy legal costs and failed to recoup any rents from those who had pirated his invention. It has been claimed that the new shuttle doubled a weaver's production, created 'a yarn famine' (B. Woodcroft, Brief Biographies of Inventors, 1863, 3), and so necessitated the development of spinning machinery by Wyatt, Hargreaves, and Arkwright. No evidence has so far been produced to support such a hypothesis, which assumes that a weaver would prefer to increase his production rather than his leisure time.
It remains certain that a weaver spent only one-third of his time at the loom in passing the shuttle through the shed and that he required considerable practice in order to master the effective use of the new picking peg. The shuttle was devised to serve the needs of the woollen industry, wherein the weaving of broadcloth had already entered upon a process of long-term decline. It came into use in the manufacture of baize in Rossendale and Rochdale from 1735 and was also adopted from the 1750s in the cotton industry, especially in the fustian trade of Bolton, where warps proved more resistant to breakage than in the woollen industry. It had come into general use in the trade of Lancashire by 1780 and was introduced into the woollen industry in Yorkshire from about 1763 but into that of the west country only from 1792.
In 1738 Kay patented a windmill for raising water from mine shafts, and in 1745 he took out a joint patent with Joseph Stell of Keighley for an improved Dutch or swivel loom, driven by water power, for weaving tapes and other narrow goods; it made the first use of tappets in order to control the pedals. In those patents he described himself in 1738 as an engineer and in 1745 as a gentleman. Then in 1747 he emigrated to France. Several factors may have influenced this decision: the failure of the 1745 rising, given the Jacobite tradition of his family, the impending expiry of his fourteen-year patent of 1733, the heavy burden of accumulated debts, and the failure of his application to parliament for financial relief.
In France Kay learned of the death of his wife in childbirth, but he also secured the encouragement which he had been denied in England. He obtained in 1747 a patent for the sole manufacture and sale in France of his wheel-shuttle for fourteen years, and in 1749 he was granted a government subsidy and life pension, upon condition that he severed all ties with England. To help him in the task of manufacture in a Paris workshop he brought over three of his sons from England—Robert Kay (1728–1802), James Kay, and John Kay (1740–1791)—but he soon found that French weavers were diligently counterfeiting ‘the English shuttle’ (la navette anglaise, as it was styled in a French publication of 1763).
He also resumed the efforts to improve the process of carding which he had first made in the early 1730s. Between 1750 and 1754 he perfected and manufactured a superior card-making machine. His machines came into use in both the woollen and cotton industries of France; while the card-making machine proved of great benefit to the spinning industry, the shuttle secured general acceptance only in the 1800s. Kay may well have been adversely affected by the outbreak of the Seven Years' War in 1756. He revisited England not once but at least five times, in 1753–4, 1757–8, 1759–60, 1764–8, and 1773–4, suffering the revocation of his pension in 1759.
Robert Kay extended the use of his father's wheel-shuttle from a single shuttle to two or more shuttles, housed in a drop box to the side of the loom, so permitting the easier weaving of cross-striped fabrics. The drop box was invented in 1760 but was never patented. Robert also improved the capacity of the wheel-shuttle for weaving checks and bed ticks and, in 1773, the card-making machine. In 1764 he appealed to the Society of Arts for a reward for his father's invention, but the application proved untimely, since the society criticized Kay for his activities in France. Ten years later, in 1774, the Society of Arts awarded a bounty of 50 guineas to Kay for his cards but not for his shuttle.
In 1770 John Kay's French pension was restored and thereafter he thought up six new inventions relating to canal excavation, dock cleansing, temperature regulation, and silk manufacture. He outlined an impressive programme to the French authorities in 1779, when the minister Mignot de Montigny recognized him as a 'genius'. Kay also aroused the interest of Richard Arkwright about 1780 because of his efforts to maintain his patent rights against opponents. He wrote his last recorded letter from Sens in Burgundy on 8 June 1779, but was reported in 1780 to be living 'in credit and affluence' ([D. Rasbotham], Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton Manufacture, 1780, 10). He died in the south of France during the winter of 1780–81. The exact date and place remain unknown, as does the site of his grave; the reason for the absence of information may well be found in the Anglo-French war of 1778–83.
In some respects the life of John Kay resembles that of William Lee, another inventor of genius who emigrated to France and died there, and who for long remained an obscure figure. Kay, however, became the subject of more legends than any other inventor, legends which seem to have been largely created during the nineteenth century. The first centenary of the patent passed in 1833 without any attendant publicity. The efforts made from 1843 by the inventor's great-grandson Thomas Sutcliffe (1791–1849) to raise a subscription for the benefit of Kay's descendants proved fruitless but set in motion the elaboration of the Kay legend.
That legend was embodied in the biographies published in 1863 by Bennet Woodcroft and in 1874 by Francis Espinasse, Lancashire Worthies, in the fresco of John Kay … AD 1753 painted in 1890 by Ford Madox Brown for Manchester's town hall, and in the Kay memorial inaugurated in Bury in 1908, inscribed with the phrase 'died in exile and poverty'. In that legend Kay became the personification of 'merit neglected and genius unrewarded' (Sutcliffe) and the archetype of the heroic inventor who failed to profit from his own invention.
That legend was dispelled by the meticulous research of John Lord (1839–1903) and Julia Mann (1891–1985), published in 1903 and 1931, but nevertheless continues to be reiterated with a dogmatic fervour. It may be well, therefore, to mention some dozen associated myths which have long been refuted. It is untrue that Kay was of gentle birth and was the grandson of a Yorkshire baronet, that he was educated abroad, that his father became a Levant merchant and died in 1727 or 1728, that his family owned a woollen ‘factory’ at Colchester in Essex, that he invented the fly-shuttle in the year 1738, that he also invented spinning machines (the product of confusion with the clockmaker John Kay of Warrington), that he resided for seven years in Leeds, that his shuttle provoked riots and plunged the whole country into uproar, that he was driven by hostile weavers out of Leeds in 1745 and out of Bury in 1753, that he was forced to sell the family estate to the first Robert Peel in 1745, that his brother William became a founder in 1754 of the Society of Arts, that Kay fled to France in order to escape from the wrath of hostile weavers, and that he died in Paris in poverty in 1762.
In reality Kay was an inventor of supreme talent, resource, and vision but sadly lacking in business capacity. His inventions were both simple and practical as well as the first to be made in the region, justifying his description as 'the Christopher Colombus among the mechanical inventors of Lancashire' (Lord, 156). Their adoption in France proved them to be commoners of nature, belonging to no single place or country. The wire reeds secured universal acceptance. The fly-shuttle was never modified after the 1760s and remained a device of fundamental importance.
It came into use in the 1870s in Japan, in the 1890s in India, and in the 1900s in China, where it enhanced the productivity of the world's largest stock of hand-looms and enabled them to withstand the competition of mill-made goods, whether emanating from Manchester, Bombay, or Shanghai. The shuttle remained even more significant for its indirect influence upon the mechanization of weaving. The picking peg replaced for the first time the human hand by a mechanical device and so took the first historic step towards the creation of a wholly automatic loom. The negative drive incorporated in the shuttle's action became universal in the later power-loom.
The Kay–Stell Dutch loom was first driven by a water wheel at Keighley in 1750 and then at Garratt Hall on the Medlock in Manchester about 1760, so creating the town's first true factory. Kay's card-making machine was improved by his sons and stimulated other inventors from the 1760s. In Bury itself the firm of loom makers Robert Hall & Sons was established in 1844 and erected in 1877 a statue of Kay upon the gable of the offices of Hope foundry. The Kay memorial, inaugurated in 1908 in the Kay Gardens, bore a medallion portrait together with a list of inventions: it was surmounted by a statue symbolizing fame, surrounded by four lesser figures representing agriculture, engineering, mining, and weaving. That memorial was listed as a historic monument in 1985. In 1974 the statue from Hope foundry was transferred to the premises of Wilson and Longbottom in Barnsley, Yorkshire. In 1989 a memorial plaque was fixed to the wall of Park farmstead.
Sources
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J. Lord, Memoir of John Kay of Bury (1903)
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J. de Lacy Mann, ‘The introduction of the fly shuttle’, in A. P. Wadsworth and J. de Lacy Mann, The cotton trade and industrial Lancashire, 1600–1780 (1931), 449–71
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[A. Barlow], ‘Weaving, no. VI: hand loom weaving’, Engineering (12 June 1874), 422–4 [repr. in The history and principles of weaving by hand and by power (1878), 81–97]
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A. Paulinyi, ‘John Kay's flying shuttle’, Textile History, 17 (1986), 149–66
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H. T. Wood, ‘The inventions of John Kay (1704–1770)’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 60 (1911–12), 73–86
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J. R. Harris, Industrial espionage and technology transfer. Britain and France in the eighteenth century (1998), 79–94
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X. Linant de Bellefonds, ‘John Kay et l'essor des textiles français’, Les techniciens anglais dans l'industrie française au XVIIIe siècle, LLD diss., Université de Droit de Paris, 1971
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J. de L. Mann, ‘The card making machine’, Textile History, 7 (1976), 186–9
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J. de L. Mann, The cloth industry in the west of England from 1660 to 1880 (1971), 139–41
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‘The textile inventor John Kay’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 48 (1965–6), 9–12
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R. Hirst, ‘The life of John Kay’, 1983, Bury Historical Society
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G. M. Ramsden, ‘A record of the Kay family of Bury, Lancashire, in the 17th and 18th centuries’, 1978, Lancs. RO
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T. Sutcliffe, ‘Address to the merchants, manufacturers, etc., respecting the invention of J. Kay’ (1846)
Likenesses
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T. O. Barlow, engraving, 1863, repro. in W. S. Murphy, The textile industries, 8 vols. (1910–11)
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F. M. Brown, fresco, 1890
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engraving, Sci. Mus. [see illus.]
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portrait; loaned to V&A, 1877
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portrait, repro. in Lord, Memoir, 54