Skip to content
RichseenAtlas← AtlasSign in

The spinning jenny

technology · earth · Lancashire, England

A hand-powered frame, devised by James Hargreaves in Lancashire around 1764 and patented in 1770, on which one spinner draws and twists several threads at once instead of one. Early jennies carried about eight spindles; later ones carried many times that. Its importance is where it sat in the production chain. Weaving had been sped up first — Kay's flying shuttle of 1733 let one weaver work a broad loom alone — which starved the loom of yarn and put spinners, overwhelmingly women working at home, at a premium. The jenny relieved that shortage and in doing so it moved the bottleneck rather than removing it. It also shows how little the earliest mechanisation had to do with steam: the jenny needed no power source but a hand, it lived in cottages as easily as in sheds, and it made cheap weft yarn rather than the strong warp yarn a cotton-only cloth requires. That last limitation is what the water frame answered.

Read in · 1

Evidence · 1
Timeline

No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.

Connections · 1
Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 23 blocks · 1 evidence · 19 related

  1. Story
  2. A hand-powered frame, devised by James Hargreaves in Lancashire around 1764 and patented in 1770, on which one spinner draws and twists several threads at once instead of one. Early jennies carried about eight spindles; later ones carried many times that. Its importance is where it sat in the production chain. Weaving had been sped up first — Kay's flying shuttle of 1733 let one weaver work a broad loom alone — which starved the loom of yarn and put spinners, overwhelmingly women working at home, at a premium. The jenny relieved that shortage and in doing so it moved the bottleneck rather than removing it. It also shows how little the earliest mechanisation had to do with steam: the jenny needed no power source but a hand, it lived in cottages as easily as in sheds, and it made cheap weft yarn rather than the strong warp yarn a cotton-only cloth requires. That last limitation is what the water frame answered.
  3. Knowledge
  4. The spinning jenny
  5. The British textile industry
  6. Connections
  7. The British textile industry
  8. The water frame
  9. Hargreaves devises the spinning jenny
  10. The spinning jenny
  11. Raw cotton
  12. The Engels pause
  13. The Factory Inspectorate
  14. Parliament bans the use of printed calicoes
  15. Hargreaves devises the spinning jenny
  16. Crompton completes the spinning mule
  17. The rotative engine turns a shaft
  18. Cartwright patents the power loom
  19. Arkwright's patents are overturned
  20. The handloom weavers are displaced
  21. The Great Exhibition
  22. Evidence
  23. Supports the high-wage-economy explanation of why mechanisation was profitable in Britain first, the sequence of textile bottlenecks, and the dating and interpretation of the Engels pause. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session — outbound HTTP to research domains is blocked by the environment's egress proxy and the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted before this pack began. The book is a real and widely held title, but nothing attributed to it here was read from it.
Close the narrative
Observed changes · 0

No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.

Actions

Read the assembled narrativeContinue in StudioOpen TwinTwin does not start a decision from this kind of object.ShareSaveSaved objects are part of the authenticated projection, which is declared and not yet built.

/atlas?object=TECH_SPINNING_JENNY&experience=TECH_SPINNING_JENNY