John Rylands John Rylands John Rylands (7 February 1801 – 11 December 1888) was an English entrepreneur and philanthropist. He was the owner of the largest textile manufacturing concern in the United Kingdom, and Manchester's first multi-millionaire. After having learned to weave, Rylands became a small-scale manufacturer of hand-looms, while also working in the draper's shop which his father had opened in St Helens. He displayed a "precocious shrewdness" for retailing, and in partnership with his two elder brothers expanded into the wholesale trade. So successful were they that, in 1819, Rylands' father merged his retail business with theirs, creating the firm
Rylands v Fletcher the "thing", and where there is statutory authority for the accumulation. The principles of "Rylands v Fletcher" were initially applied in Scots law, first in the case of "Mackintosh v Mackintosh", where a fire spreading from the defendant's land to the claimant's land caused property damage. Scots lawyers and judges applied "Rylands" differently from their English counterparts, however. While the rule is interpreted in England and Wales as being distinct from negligence and the rules of duty of care and liability applied there, the principle in Scotland was that "negligence is still the ground of liability. The only difference is