Spinning Mule - History

History

Before the 1770s, textile production was a cottage industry using flax and wool. Weaving was a family activity. The children and women would card the fibre, which the women would spin into yarn; the male weaver would use a frame loom to weave this into cloth. This was then tentered in the sun to bleach it. The same production system was attempted with cotton, but the demand was too high, and with the invention by John Kay of the flying shuttle, which made the loom twice as productive, more cotton yarn was being woven than the traditional spinners could supply. There were two types of spinning wheel: the Simple Wheel, which uses an intermittent process, and the more refined Saxony wheel, which drives a differential spindle and flyer with a heck (an apparatus that guides the thread to the reels) in a continuous process. These two wheels became the starting point of technological development. Businessmen such as Richard Arkwright employed inventors to find solutions that would increase the amount of yarn spun, then took out the relevant patents. The spinning jenny allowed a group of eight spindles to be operated together. It mirrored the simple wheel; the rovings were clamped and a frame moved forward stretching and thinning the roving. A wheel was rapidly turned as the frame was pushed back, and the spindles rotated, twisted the rovings into yarn and collecting it on the spindles.

The throstle and the later water frame pulled the rovings through a set of attenuating rollers, spinning at differing speeds these pulled the thread continuously and it was twisted by the heck as it was wound on the heavy spindles. Eight or sixteen of these were mounted in parallel on a static frame driven usually by a water wheel. It was ideas from these two system that inspired the spinning mule. It was the water frame that inspired the ring frame.

The increased supply of yarn inspired developments in loom design such as Edmund Cartwright's power loom. Some spinners and handloom weavers opposed the perceived threat to their livelihood: there were frame-breaking riots and, in 1811–3, the Luddite riots. The preparatory and associated tasks allowed many children to be employed until this was regulated.

The hand-operated mule was a breakthrough in yarn production and the machines were copied by Samuel Slater, who founded the cotton industry in Rhode Island. Development over the next century and a half led to an automatic mule and to finer and stronger yarn. The ring frame, originating in New England in the 1820s, was little used in Lancashire until the 1890s. It required more energy and could not produce the finest counts. -->