SIR Richard Arkwright was a leading figure in the industrial revolution of the 18th century, whose textile machines and mills established the basis of the factory system.

Arkwright started out as a barber, but after the tragic loss of his first wife in 1755, he discovered a flair for business that brought him fame, fortune, and quite a few enemies. He found penniless inventors and invested in their ingenious machines for spinning cotton, which he then put to work in mills all over England and Scotland. Arkwright’s brazen attempt to patent these inventions as his own, in the hope of strangling competition at birth, was - fortunately - struck down by the courts.

But Arkwright’s real innovation was not any machine. It was the factory system itself. The small towns he built around his mills, for whole families drafted in from the surrounding countryside, were soon copied by others, changing British society, industry and economics forever.