Paul-Wyatt cotton mills

[1] Operating from 1741 until 1764 they were built to house the roller spinning machinery invented by Lewis Paul and John Wyatt.

[4] The mill "containing fifty rollers ... turned by two donkeys walking round an axis"[5] was not a commercial success, with Wyatt unable to enforce the levels of organisation and discipline that an operation on this scale demanded; Andrew Ure was to comment that Wyatt was "favourably placed, in a mechanical point of view, for maturing his admirable scheme" but "a gentle and passive spirit, little qualified to cope with the hardships of a new manufacturing enterprise".

Matthew Boulton was later to observe that the Paul-Wyatt mill "would have got money had it been in good hands", but nothing is known of it after Wyatt's release in October 1743.

Edward Cave – publisher of The Gentleman's Magazine and one of the friends of Dr Johnson who had funded the development of Paul and Wyatt's invention – experimented in London with running the machinery by hand and by 1742 had set up 250 spindles at Marvell's Mill, a watermill in Northampton.

This may have been in operation by 1744, but is first mentioned in 1748, when both Bourn and Paul patented machinery for carding cotton - a premilinary process that must be undertaken before spinning.