Samuel Slater, born in 1768 in Belper, Derbyshire, went to work at 10 in Jedediah Strutt’s cotton mill, which ran Richard Arkwright’s water frame. After his father died he was indentured to Strutt at 14 and spent seven years mastering the machines and the management of the factory. Britain banned the export of textile machinery designs, so in 1789, at 21, Slater memorized the whole system and sailed in secret to New York. Belper burned him in effigy as Slater the Traitor. In Rhode Island he partnered with the Quaker merchant Moses Brown, whose 32-spindle frame would not run, promising to work for nothing and throw the machine over the bridge if his yarn failed to match England’s.
With blacksmiths Oziel and David Wilkinson turning iron parts by hand, Slater and Brown opened the first successful water-powered roller spinning mill in the United States on the Blackstone River at Pawtucket in 1793. His first workers were children aged 7 to 12, and his Rhode Island system hired whole families housed in company towns. The mills fed demand for Southern cotton grown by enslaved labor after Eli Whitney’s 1794 gin. An 1824 wage cut set off the first factory strike in U.S. history. Slater died in 1835 in Webster, Massachusetts, owning stakes in 13 mills, and Andrew Jackson called him the father of the American Industrial Revolution.
- Wages and rent ran through family credit accounts, and Slater added Sunday schools taught by college students.
- By 1815 there were 140 cotton manufacturers within 30 miles of Providence running over 130,000 spindles.
- His wife Hannah Wilkinson invented two-ply thread in 1793 and became the first American woman granted a patent.
- The 1824 strike was led by women weavers facing a 25% pay cut and longer hours.
- Slater refused to hire managers outside his family, and his son Horatio Nelson Slater later modernized the firm.
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