Hawkwright Frame & Principia Arcana

Discovery, Scientific

At around the same time as Valentine's Principia Arcana is published, a financially-challenged magician named Robert Hawkwright uses its principles to invent a self-spinning, self-carding textile frame on a bet. The Hawkwright Frame revolutionises the textiles industry, and Hawkwright becomes extraordinarily rich.

In one of those odd coincidences of history, two things happened at approximately the same time.  

First, an eccentric wizard named Robert Hawkwright visited a friend’s textile mill to research woolen textiles for a project he'd accepted. Hard up for cash, he bet the mill’s owner that he could, with the aid of magic, weave more cloth in a day than the mill could in a week. Using two trivial spells he invented a self-carding, self-spinning frame, won the bet, and went back to his tower well satisfied. The next day, his friend paid him a thousand gold pieces—cash— to produce more “Hawkwright frames”. The befuddled wizard, who, like many of his profession, had never bothered to investigate the dull world of textiles, became immensely rich.

Second, a reclusive foreign wizard named Valentine Sims published Principia Arcana, a new book of theoretical magic. In obtuse but incontrovertible terms, the book explained the nature of spells, wands, scrolls, ghosts, and a dozen other seemingly disconnected phenomena mathematically, allowing for magical principles to be applied to physical devices. It shook the wizarding traditions of the world to their foundations (though druids peevishly pointed out they’d been saying the same thing for centuries).