It was not just his own family that wanted to know what Samuel Crompton was doing by night in his quaint Bolton workshop.
In 1779 Samuel Crompton, who came from a family of Bolton weavers, developed the ‘spinning mule’ — so called because it was a hybrid of two existing machines for spinning cotton thread, the spinning jenny and the waterframe. He kept his invention secret, but the quantities of superfine yarn he released onto the local market excited the envy, curiosity and resourcefulness of his rivals.