James Smith (3 January 1789,

Glasgow Glasgow is the Cities of Scotland, most populous city in Scotland, located on the banks of the River Clyde in Strathclyde, west central Scotland. It is the List of cities in the United Kingdom, third-most-populous city in the United Kingdom ...

– 10 June 1850, Kingencleuch near Mauchline, age 61)Obituary, ''

Gentleman's Magazine ''The Gentleman's Magazine'' was a monthly magazine founded in London, England, by Edward Cave in January 1731. It ran uninterrupted for almost 200 years, until 1907, ceasing publication altogether in 1922. It was the first to use the term '' ...

'', 1850, pp. 333-35 was a Scottish inventor whose inventions include a reaping machine, a subsoil plough and the first endless chain of flats for

carding In Textile manufacturing, textile production, carding is a mechanical process that disentangles, cleans and intermixes fibres to produce a continuous web or sliver (textiles), sliver suitable for subsequent processing. This is achieved by passi ...

. Smith's father, a self-made

businessman, died when he was two months old; his mother went to live with her brother, a friend and pupil of

Richard Arkwright Sir Richard Arkwright (23 December 1732 – 3 August 1792) was an English inventor and a leading entrepreneur during the early Industrial Revolution. He is credited as the driving force behind the development of the spinning frame, known as ...

, and managing partner of cotton-works at Deanston. Smith attended Glasgow University before entering his uncle's factory and becoming manager aged 18. Aged 24, his invention of the reaping machine won him a medal from the Imperial Agricultural Society of St Petersburgh. In 1823 Smith came into possession of his uncle's farm, and set about systematically draining the soil and working it with a subsoil plough. In 1831 he published his agricultural recommendations as a small pamphlet, ''Thorough Draining and Deep Working'', which attracted attention in the agricultural crisis of 1834. Smith also introduced mechanical innovations in spinning: in 1834 he improved Archibald Buchanan's self-stripping card, filing a patent (British patent no. 6560) for fixing the flat cards on an endless chain, allowing them to be regularly cleaned. Smith was appointed by Robert Peel to the Commission into the sanitation and health of manufacturing towns, which led to the 1848 Public Health Act: Smith pressed to make liquid manure useful to agriculture. Smith was also an active member of the Royal Agricultural Improvement Society of Ireland, and a member of the Glasgow Philosophical Society, contributing papers to their ''Transactions''.

References

1789 births 1850 deaths Scottish inventors Scottish agriculturalists Spinning 19th-century British businesspeople {{UK-business-bio-1780s-stub