History
Until the 1740s all spinning was done by hand using a spinning wheel. The state of the art spinning wheel in England was known as the Jersey wheel however an alternative wheel, the Saxony wheel was a double band treadle spinning wheel where the spindle rotated faster than the traveller in a ratio of 8:6, drawing on both was done by the spinners fingers.
In 1738 Lewis Paul and John Wyatt of Birmingham patented the Roller Spinning machine and the flyer-and-bobbin system, for drawing cotton to a more even thickness, using two sets of rollers that travelled at different speeds. This principle was the basis of Richard Arkwright's later water frame design. By 1742 Paul and Wyatt had opened a mill in Birmingham which used their new rolling machine powered by a donkey, this was not profitable and soon closed. A factory was opened in Northampton in 1743, with fifty spindles turning on five of Paul and Wyatt's machines, proving more successful than their first mill; this operated until 1764.
Lewis Paul invented the hand-driven carding machine in 1748. A coat of wire slips were placed around a card, which was then wrapped around a cylinder. Lewis' invention was later developed and improved by Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton, although the design came under suspicion after a fire at Daniel Bourn's factory in Leominster which used Paul and Wyatt's spindles. Bourn produced a similar patent in the same year.
Rev John Dyer of Northampton recognised the importance of the Paul and Wyatt cotton spinning machine in a poem in 1757:
A circular machine, of new design
In conic shape: it draws and spins a thread
Without the tedious toil of needless hands.
A wheel invisible, beneath the floor,
To ev'ry member of th' harmonius frame,
Gives necessary motion. One intent
O'erlooks the work; the carded wool, he says,
So smoothly lapped around those cylinders,
Which gently turning, yield it to yon cirue
Of upright spindles, which with rapid whirl
Spin out in long extenet an even twine.
Read more about this topic: Cotton-spinning Machinery
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