Development
Richard Arkwright employed John Kay to produce a new spinning machine that Kay had worked on with (or possibly stolen from) another inventor called Thomas Highs. With the help of other local craftsmen the team produced the spinning frame, which produced a stronger thread than the spinning jenny produced by James Hargreaves. The frame employed the draw rollers invented by Lewis Paul to stretch, or attenuate, the yarn.
A thick 'string' of cotton roving was passed between three sets of rollers, each set rotating faster than the previous one. In this way it was reduced in thickness and increased in length before a strengthening twist was added by a bobbin-and-flyer mechanism.
Too large to be operated by hand, the spinning frame needed a new source of power. Arkwright at first experimented with horses, but decided to employ the power of the water wheel, which gave the invention the name 'water frame'.
For some time, the stronger yarn produced by the spinning frame was used in looms for the lengthwise "warp" threads that bound cloth together, while hand powered jennies provided the weaker yarn used for the horizontal filler "weft" threads. The jennies required skill but was inexpensive and could be used in a home. The spinning frames required significant capital but required little skill.
Read more about this topic: Spinning Frame
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Somehow we have been taught to believe that the experiences of girls and women are not important in the study and understanding of human behavior. If we know men, then we know all of humankind. These prevalent cultural attitudes totally deny the uniqueness of the female experience, limiting the development of girls and women and depriving a needy world of the gifts, talents, and resources our daughters have to offer.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”
—H.A.L. (Herbert Albert Laurens)