Inventor of mechanical cotton spinning and entrepreneur. His career epitomized the marriage of science, invention, and engineering with entrepreneurship and business acumen. Many people then and since have fiercely rejected the value of this kind of innovation on a variety of grounds, including esthetic, but especially because of a belief that machinery robs people of jobs. The mob that famously ransacked and ruined Arkwright's mill near Chorley raised this cry: that he was destroying jobs. As recently as the 1950's, Eleanor Roosevelt in her newspaper column blamed much of unemployment on the insidious effects of automation. Most economists argue contrariwise today that while automation visibly displaces workers in the short run and in a single place, it rather less visibly creates more jobs in the long run and throughout an economy.