Decline of The Mechanical Spinning Wheel in China
Elvin says that cotton began replacing hemp as the main fiber crop shortly after the mechanical spinning wheel was invented. Cotton produced far higher fiber yields per unit of land than hemp, and was thus far more profitable, so it largely replaced hemp. As hemp fibers are much longer than cotton fibers, existing mechanical spinning wheels designed for hemp could not be used to spin cotton fibers without substantial mechanical modifications to the apparatus. Apparently, no such modifications were ever made. All spinning in China reverted to far less efficient hand-spinning, and the automatic spinning wheel was forgotten. Elvin proposes several factors whose confluence prevented any further technical development of the automatic spinning wheel.
Read more about this topic: High-level Equilibrium Trap
Famous quotes containing the words decline of, decline, mechanical, spinning, wheel and/or china:
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung. We are, therefore, suffering from galloping consumption. The restoration of the wheel arrests the progress of the fell disease.”
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948)
“But if you know that you are a man too, and that even such are those that rule, learn this first of all: that all human affairs are a wheel which, as it turns, does not allow the same men always to be fortunate.”
—Herodotus (c. 484–424 B.C.)
“Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve, I’ve dreamed of havin’ my own things about me. My spinet over there and a table here. My own chairs to rest upon and a dresser over there in that corner, and my own china and pewter shinin’ about me.”
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)