Benjamin Gott

Benjamin Gott (24 June 1762 – 14 February 1840) was one of the leading figures in the industrial revolution, in the field of textiles. His factory at Armley Mills, Armley, Leeds, was once the largest factory in the world and is now home to the Armley Mills Industrial Museum.

Benjamin Gott

Early life

Gott was born in Calverley, Pudsey in West Yorkshire, England, to John Gott who was a civil engineer and county surveyor. Benjamin was sent to Bingley Grammar School until he was 17. When he finished school in 1780, his father apprenticed him to Wormald & Fountaine, wool merchants.

Career

Gott's most notable contribution to the industrial revolution happened at Armley Mills, which he leased in 1804. The mill had been badly damaged by fire when he bought the ruins and ordered that the rebuilding include cast iron internal frames and other fireproofing measures. When the repairs were completed in 1805, the new factory was the largest wool factory in the world.

Gott experimented with new ways of making wool cloth, introducing innovations such as using steam power and power looms. Gott made a large fortune, and he reinvested much of it back into improving his mills and buying new ones. He also founded almshouses in Armley, collected fine art, and presided over the founding of the Leeds Philosophical & Literary Society in 1819.

His other mills included Bean Ings (1792), the first wool factory, Burley Mills (1798), and St Ann's Mills (1824).

Gott became Mayor of Leeds in 1799, and, by the time he died in 1840, he was a millionaire. His home, Armley House (now Gotts Park Mansion) and grounds designed by Humphrey Repton overlooked the Kirkstall Valley and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal from the Armley side. In 1928 Gott's house and grounds were leased by Leeds City Council to create a municipal golf course and Armley Park.

gollark: (also, I'm pretty sure IPFS doesn't guarantee that your file exists forever at no cost, someone has to be pinning it or viewing it)
gollark: It's probably irrelevant though, as I doubt *that* many people actually care about having the arbitrary ownership token™ in the first place and have the technical knowledge to check in much detail whether you actually do have it.
gollark: Smart contracts *have* been known to have complex bugs which are also completely impossible to patch after they've been released onto an unsuspecting public.
gollark: If I actually cared about that for some bizarre reason, it would presumably be possible to just copy the NFT code and patch that out.
gollark: Surely if you want to duplicate it you could just... use the *same* seed, again...?
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.