When James II. had taken refuge in France, and William and Mary been received as King and Queen of England, things began to assume a settled aspect, and I thought I might venture to begin some sort of business again.
There was a sort of stuff, manufactured at Norwich at that time, called Calimanco, which was very substantial, and also fashionable, and I determined upon making the attempt to imitate it. I had never, you know, served any apprenticeship, so it was all the same to me what I undertook to make, I must call upon the ingenuity of my own brain to aid me. I therefore thought it would be better, when I began again, to try something new instead of going on in the old beaten track. The stuff called serge, which we had made before, was now out of fashion, and those who manufactured it scarcely earned salt to their porridge; but then, they had served an apprenticeship to it, and as they worked altogether mechanically, and not with the understanding, they were really incapable of putting their hands to any thing else. I was possessed of a large share of that sort of perseverance which some people call obstinacy, and without which I certainly could not have overcome the almost insurmountable difficulty which met me at the outset.
The Norwich stuff was made of extremely fine worsted, double twisted. Now, there was not in Taunton a spinner who could spin so fine, nor a weaver who knew how to weave it; no machinery suitable for the manufacture, nor a person who knew how to construct it. I had never seen the machinery, but I saw that if money was to be gained by manufacturing, this was the stuff that ought to be produced. As I could not get the worsted spun fine enough to allow of re-twisting and doubling it, I must try what could be done with a single thread.
