Patrick O'Brien's research in the area of concern of this festschrift volume has been so wide-ranging that it seems likely that all its chapters will be making some reference to his work. In the case of the subject which has fallen to my lot, however, his contribution has been so substantial that when I set to work I wondered whether there remained anything for me to do beyond reporting on his achievements. To do this, I concluded, certainly represented part of my brief, and would be helpful for diffusing his ideas on the issue as they have been developed over a period of some ten years and are scattered among journals and essay collections. But following my rereading of what he and his collaborators, Trevor Griffiths and David Hunt, had written, I perceived that there might also be room for a personal contribution on my part in the form of some reflection on the process of invention within the cotton industry. In the chapter in which O'Brien and his team come closest to such reflecting – entitled ‘Technological change during the First Industrial Revolution: the paradigm case of textiles, 1688–1851’ – they do so with respect to the textile sector as a whole – focusing purely on cotton, I had gained the impression, had the potential of yielding some value added.