Samuel Slater

Slater Mill - Rhode Island

 Samuel Slater

By: Sherri Beeson

Samuel Slater has been called the "father of the American factory system."Samuel Slater was born in Belper, Derbyshire, England June 9, 1768, the fifth son of a farming family of eight children.  Samuel received a basic education at a school run by a Mr. Jackson in Belper. [1] At a very young age he began work at the cotton mill opened that year by Jedediah Strutt As his twenty-first birthday the  cotton industry in England was  well developed and scope for expansion was limited. Starting his own company was not a valid option for Slater in England. At this time the desperate American textile industry was offering $100 to people with British technological knowledge. This technology was highly valued and Slater was a prime pupil in British textiles. The exportation of British technology secrets was illegal at that time. Anyone caught attempting to export these textile industry secrets out of England into other countries was charged with treason.  But in September 1789, Slater arrived in America with the secrets in his memory and on documents hidden in his clothes. When he arrived in New York City and was hired in the local textile mill, he realized how valuable his information was to the American industry.  He went on and decided to start his own textile factory, which would eventually become Slater Mill. After studying the various cotton manufactures in the area.  He purchased a range of spinning and weaving equipment.  Slater teamed up with a Quaker merchant, Moses Brown, to build America's first water-powered cotton spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. By the e 1790, it was up and running.  The mill required that workers  walk  treadmills  in order  to generate power.  By 1791, a waterwheel drove the machinery that carded and spun cotton into thread. Slater employed families, including children, to live and work at the mill site. Slater and his brother built a mill village they called Slatersville, also in Rhode Island. It included a large, modern mill, tenement houses for its workers, and a company store -- a small pocket of industry, a ready-made rural village. Slater's factory system became known as the Rhode Island System. By 1800 the phenomenal success of the Slater mill had been duplicated by other entrepreneurs; by 1810 U.S. had some 50 cotton-yarn mills, many of them started in response to the Embargo of 1807 that cut off imports from Britain. The War of 1812 sped up the process of industrialization; when it ended in 1815 there were within 30 miles of Providence 140 cotton manufacturers employing 26,000 hands and operating 130,000 spindles.  The American textile industry was launched. Slater died in 1835.

Samuel Slater

Born May 4, 1768

Died April 21, 1835