Note 388 — Chapter V · THE MULE AND THE RISE OF A NEW COTTON MANUFACTURE
Reading edition
Kennedy, ibid., p. 336.
Autobiography of Robert Owen, i., pp. 25-26: “My three spinners were spinning the cotton yarn on my three mules from rovings. I had no machinery to make rovings, and was obliged to purchase them,—they were the half-made materials to be spun into thread. I had become acquainted with two industrious Scotchmen, of the names of M‘Connel and Kennedy, who had also commenced about the same time as myself to make cotton machinery upon a small scale, and they had now proceeded so far as to make some of the machinery for preparing the cotton for the mule spinning machinery so far as to enable them to make the rovings, which they sold in that state to the spinners at a good profit.... This was in the year 1790.... They could then only make the rovings, without finishing the thread; and I could only finish the thread, without being competent to make the rovings.”