The Father of the American Revolution: Samuel Slater

Samuel Slater was known as the “father of the American factory system, the father of American industry, and the founder of the American Industrial Revolution.” He was born in Derbyshire, England on June 9th, 1768. He became a part of the textile industry in 1783 when he became an apprentice for the owner of a factory mill, Jedediah Strutt. Soon after being apprenticed, he became superintendent of Strutt’s mill.

Six years later in 1789, Slater secretly emigrated to the United States when he found that they were offering rewards for textile information. Britain had forbidden textile workers from leaving for fear that they would share valuable textile information. Slater had dreamed of starting a textile business and since he believed that Britain was at its peak, he found that the US was the right place to be. He landed in New York in late 1789 having memorized textile information to share with America. He took a job at the New York Manufacturing Industry soon after he landed.

In 1790 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Slater and Moses Brown, a Quaker merchant, built the first water-powered cotton spinning mill. At first, workers running on a treadmill powered the machine, but later a waterwheel was added to run the machine. With the development of this machine, came the start of the spinning industry. Slater also built many other textile machines to help improve the industry. He was the first person to emigrate to the US that knew how to build and run textile machines.

In 1793, Slater built the first profitable water-powered textile mill in Pawtucket Rhode Island with funding from Providence investors. Slater easily found many employees. He hired children, adults, and families. Slater built a larger mill on his own in 1797 and called it the White mill. In 1803, along with his brother, he built a little mill village called Slatersville in Rhode Island where he provided housing, a company store, and a large mill where people could work. This idea of creating a “village” for workers, came to be known as the Rhode Island System. This system was copied for years in textile industries in the United States. The cotton industry continued to improve for the next ten years all due to Slater’s revolutionary ideas. Samuel Slater died in 1835 at the age of sixty-seven.

If you would like to find out more about Samuel Slater feel free to check out my sources: http://www.woonsocket.org/slaterhist.htm

http://inventors.about.com/od/sstartinventors/a/Samuel_Slater.htm

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/slater_hi.html

http://web.bryant.edu/~ehu/h364proj/fall_98/hulton/slater.htm