His training covered the manufacture of textile machinery including carding engines, jennies, and water frames.

The mill has six carding engines, with the other necessary preparing machinery, and ten spinning frames, containing 368 spindles.

The core of the union's membership were the strippers and grinders, skilled adult male mechanics, who maintained the carding engines.

He also patented a rotary carding engine that transformed raw cotton into cotton lap.

Arkwright spent £12,000 perfecting his machine, which contained the "crank and comb" for removing the cotton web from carding engines.

It is undisputed that he invented a perpetual carding engine in 1773, and invented an improved double spinning jenny.

In order to run these spindles in the spinning rooms, the cotton had to be prepared using openers, scutchers, carding engines.

Arkwright had patented a water frame for the spinning of cotton, and then in 1775 he solved the other problem by patenting a mechanical carding engine.

It was built in 1834 to harness water power, with a carding engine on the ground floor and spinning mules and looms on the upper floors.

His patent included a carding engine and a spinning machine that introduced the new technique of "wet spinning" flax, which revolutionised the flax trade.

When David Bremner collated his survey of the Industries of Scotland in 1869, it had five sets of carding engines and employed around 300 people.

Extra machinery e.g. carding engines, spinning mules, doubling and hanking machines and warping mill can be viewed Monday - Friday April - October.

Towards the latter half of the 1700's the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny and the carding engine were among the many splendid inventions which started the industrial revolution in the north of England.

The opening and cleaning machines broke the bales down and prepared the cotton into 'lap' form which was taken to the third and fourth floor carding rooms, housing three rows of carding engines, over 130.

The floor might already have machinery (spinning mules, carding engines or looms) installed or he might have approached a cotton machinery manufacturer who would rent or lease the machinery to him.

Among the machines on display were a wool picker, a double cylinder carding engine, a 200 spindle spinning jack, a two-harness plain loom, an automatic bobbin-changing dobby loom and a shearing machine.

Amongst the depictions of carding engines, drawing frames, scutchers and bale breakers are several blank pages for new technology, whilst a number of outdated designs appear to have been pasted over with the latest advances.

It is unclear whether he got a model of this too, family papers suggest that he smuggled a spinner from Cromford over to Germany, with a collection of the parts needed to reconstruct the carding engine.

Richard Arkwright made improvements to this machine and in 1775 took out a patent for a new carding engine, which converted raw cotton buds into a continuous skein of cotton fibres which could then be spun into yarn.

Some of the three storey houses with brick facades of this period would have housed weaving lofts on the upper storey Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of 1833 noted that there were forty carding engines, eighteen fulling mills and thirty-five thousand spindles .