Hall-in-the-Wood became besieged with manufacturers burning with desire to penetrate the secret of its production. All kinds of stratagems were practised to gain admission to the house. Some climbed up to the windows of the workroom and peeped in. Crompton set up a screen to hide himself, but even that was not sufficient. One inquisitive adventurer is said to have hid himself for some days in the loft, and to have watched Crompton at work through a gimlet hole in the ceiling.
‘A man,’ he wrote, ‘has a very insecure tenure of a property which another can carry away with his eyes. A few months reduced me to the cruel necessity either of destroying my machine altogether, or giving it to the public. To destroy it, I could not think of; to give up that for which I had laboured so long, was cruel. I had no patent, nor the means of purchasing one.* In preference to destroying, I gave it to the public.’*
abridged
* A group of industrialists dissuaded him from taking out a patent by promising him money if he refrained, money which never materialised. Some online sources say that Crompton ‘sold the rights’ to Scottish entrepreneur David Dale (1739-1806), but it will be seen that there were no rights to buy. In fact Dale simply bought some of Crompton’s machines for his factory in New Lanark. In 1812 Crompton drew the Government’s attention to his gift to the nation, and was rewarded with a grant of £5,000 (about £400,000 today) by Parliament. Fellow inventor Edmund Cartwright (1743-1822) had done something similar three years before for his power loom, and received £10,000.