JAMES HARGREAVES AND THE

SPINNING JENNY

1766

FOR CENTURIES THE SPINNING WHEEL STOOD in the corner of almost every hearth in England – the basis of the country’s cottage industry. Whenever she had a spare half-hour or so, the woman (and quite often the man) of the house would sit down at the ungainly contraption to tease out raw wool into skeins that could then be sold for weaving. After the discovery of the Americas, it was often cotton wool that went on to the spindle, with merchants supplying bundles of the fluffy raw material to cottage spinners whom they paid under the ‘putting-out’ system to supply them with the finished thread. Many spinners were also weavers.

By the mid-eighteenth century the damp and industrious northwestern county of Lancashire was a major centre of this domestic cotton production, and one day in the 1760s an overturned spinning wheel inspired James Hargreaves, a hand-loom weaver from the village of Oswaldtwistle, to devise a way of dramatically increasing production. Hargreaves was struck by the way that the overturned wheel kept on spinning – as did the usually horizontal spindle.

What would happen, the weaver wondered, if several spindles were to be placed upright, side by side? Might it not be possible to spin several threads at once? Working with a knife, Hargreaves shaped a primitive engine, or ‘jinny’, a single spinning wheel, with, eventually, as many as eight separate spindles.

The ‘spinning jenny’ (finally perfected, according to his daughter Mary, in 1766) turned ordinary cottage kitchens into mini-workshops – and the initial reaction from some was distrust. Angry neighbours raided Hargreaves’ barn and burned the first twenty jennies he had built – on the grounds, according to Mary, that the machines would ‘ruin the country’. If one jenny could do the work of eight spinners, reasoned the neighbours, that would put seven out of work.

In fact, the spectacular new spinning capacity of the Lancashire cottages and barns provided the basis for a cotton boom. The county became the English centre of cotton cloth production in the 1760s and 70s, turning out not just rough calicoes but delicate muslins, and as earnings rose, spinners and weavers took to parading the streets on paydays with £5 notes in their hatbands. Their wives drank tea out of the finest china.

The fine but tough yarns needed for these new fabrics were made possible by a host of mechanical innovations. Richard Arkwright, a barber and wigmaker from Preston, worked with a Warrington clockmaker, John Kay, to produce a ‘frame’ which used rollers to draw out and twist the yarn. Samuel Crompton, a Bolton weaver, devised a crossbreed of the jenny and frame that became known as the ‘spinning mule’.

Edmund Cartwright, a poet-clergyman, thought he was enhancing this golden age of pastoral prosperity when he invented a power-loom operated by a caged bull that turned a huge treadmill. But bull power was soon supplanted by steam power, and by the end of the eighteenth century the old putting-out system was doomed. Steam- and water-powered workshops and factories could mass produce ever cheaper cotton thread and cloth. By 1801, the painter Joseph Farington was to note in his diary: ‘In the evening I walked to Cromford [Derbyshire], and saw the children coming from their work out of one of Mr Arkwright’s factories. These children had been at work from 6 or 7 o’clock this morning and it is now 7 in the evening.’ The dark satanic mill had been created.

Lecturing on these events in the 1880s, the Oxford scholar and social reformer Arnold Toynbee coined the phrase ‘Industrial Revolution’ to describe the economic transformation of England that started in the 1760s. But modern scholars dispute this impression of dramatic upheaval, pointing out the gradual and incremental nature of the process that went from Hargreaves to Arkwright and Kay, from Samuel Crompton to Cartwright, and then on to James Watt, who modified Newcomen’s engine (see p. 24) to bring steam power into the process – the Industrial Evolution, in fact.