“A man has a very insecure tenure of a property which another can carry away with his eyes. A few months reduced me to the cruel necessity either of destroying my machine, or of giving it to the public. To destroy it, I could not think of; to give up that for which I had laboured so long, was cruel. I had no patent, nor the means of purchasing one. In preference to destroying, I gave it to the public.”
![“[The original development of the Spinning Mule was a] continual…” quote by Samuel Crompton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/924/samuel-crompton-83893_baffled_the-original-development-of-the-spinning_1224654.jpg)
