Traditional myths of invention ascribe technological change to individual men and machines. Familiar tales of the Industrial Revolution are here presented and linked to their larger contexts. Associating these machines with the men who invented or adopted them helps us to understand the contexts within which they lived and operated. Their worlds indicate what external inputs went into making famous machines work. From the pauper children apprenticed to work in spinning mills to the American plantations that switched to cultivating cotton using slave labor, new machinery worked by utilizing existing sources of supplies, even as they were changing. The most important element in mechanizing the cotton industry was Richard Arkwright’s successful Parliamentary maneuvering, which carved out an exception to the Calico Acts that made cotton spinning profitable for those who used his system.