Industrial espionage, hired killers and lawsuits: the complex history of the factory

Posted: February 03, 2026

Cotton came to Britain a good 200 years before Richard Arkwright got involved. Merchants had brought the cloth from India, and it quickly became popular as a lighter alternative to wool. Yet, by the 1760s, British producers still hadn’t figured out an efficient way to spin high-quality yarn.  

Arkwright, a shrewd entrepreneur born into a poor family from Lancashire, was in the wig-making business. But he saw an opportunity and, together with a clockmaker named John Kay, developed a prototype spinning machine. 

Building on other innovations, their spinning frame managed to automate the swift finger motions of a hand spinner. Crucially, it could be operated by unskilled laborers. 

Patent in hand, Arkwright built a multi-story factory along the River Derwent. He had solved another problem: instead of horses, the mill was powered by huge waterwheels. 

You likely know where this story goes: Arkwright’s inventions became a catalyst for the industrial revolution, the dawn of mechanized mass production. The man himself became known as the father of the factory system. 

But that tidy narrative obscures a much darker history, involving industrial espionage, lengthy lawsuits and even hired assassins. 

How the design for silk mills was smuggled to England 

Before Arkwright was even born, two brothers—John and Thomas Lombe—had set out to improve English silk production. 

Spinning and weaving the delicate threads produced by silkworms was already widespread in England at the time, but largely the remit of hand spinners working from home. Earlier attempts to produce high-quality silk at mills had failed. 

The Lombe brothers knew well that French and Italian silk was widely accepted to be of higher quality, thanks in part to superior machinery. 

So in 1714, John, the younger brother, travelled to Piedmont, in Sardinia, which produced the fine double-twisted silk yarn favored by French weavers. What exactly happened next is unclear: Lombe may have disguised himself as a peasant farmer or bribed someone. Either way, he secured a job as a machine operator at one of the region's famed mills. At night, he snuck into the workshop to sketch the Italians’ equipment by candlelight. 

The Italians eventually got wise to his espionage. But Lombe managed to escape back to England with his sketches intact. The brothers swiftly secured a patent and set out to build a five-story factory beside the Derwent, the very same river that would later house Arkwright’s first cotton factory. 

The Italians did not take well to the theft of their intellectual property. Through strict laws, they had kept their craft a closely guarded secret. Now, in retaliation for Lombe’s brazen act of espionage, they reportedly banned the export of Piedmontese raw silk to England—and made any infractions punishable by death.

What’s more, legend has it that the King of Sardinia later sent a female assassin, aided by one of the Lombes’ workers, to kill John. As William Hutton, an 18th-century historian who worked at the mill, later wrote: “By these two, slow poison was supposed, and perhaps justly, to have been administered to John Lombe, who lingered two or three years in agonies, and departed.” 

The killing was likely motivated by more than pure revenge and meant to prevent Britain from establishing its own silk industry to rival Italy’s. But the assassins were too late: a few months before John’s mysterious death, at age 29, the Lombe’s factory had finally been completed. 

By some accounts, their silk mill marked the first time British workers gathered under one roof to operate machinery driven by an inanimate power source. A diarist recorded its workings in minute detail, noting that its “engine contains 26,586 wheels, and 96,746 movements, which work 73,726 yards of silk-thread, every time the waterwheel goes round, which it does three times in one minute.” 

Arkwright’s cotton mill patents challenged in court 

As for Arkwright, the great cotton innovator and purported father of the factory system turned out to be less than honest, too. 

After he had patented his own designs, Arkwright set out to maintain a monopoly by suing other manufacturers who he claimed were using his inventions without a license. But the trials that ensued backfired spectacularly: Arkwright himself was eventually found guilty of copying the spinning invention of a machine maker named Thomas Highs. A court revoked his patents, and other manufacturers were henceforth free to use the same machinery. 

Nevertheless, Arkwright was knighted the following year. By the time of his death, in 1792, he was a wealthy man with mills churning out cotton across England and Scotland. By then, silk mills based on the Lombe brothers’ concept had sprung up all over England, too.  

However sordid and dishonest its origins, the age of the factory had begun.