The spinning mule

Assembled from 17 blocks · 1 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. Samuel Crompton's machine of 1779, called a mule because it crosses the two lines it descends from: the jenny's moving carriage, which draws the yarn out, and the water frame's rollers, which feed it. The combination spins yarn that is both strong and very fine, and it is the mule rather than the water frame that let Britain undercut Indian muslins — the finest counts in the world until then — in their own export markets. Crompton had no capital to patent it and released the design in return for a subscription raised among manufacturers which never came close to its value; Parliament voted him a grant decades later. Mule spinning also had a social consequence built into its mechanics: until self-acting versions appeared in the 1820s and 1830s the carriage had to be worked by an operator with strength and judgement, and mule spinners became a skilled, well-paid and overwhelmingly male occupation in an industry whose workforce was otherwise largely women and children.
3. Knowledge
4. The water frame
5. The spinning mule
6. Connections
7. The water frame
8. Crompton completes the spinning mule
9. Richard Arkwright
10. The spinning jenny
11. Cromford Mill
12. The spinning mule
13. Arkwright patents the water frame
14. Cromford Mill begins spinning
15. Arkwright's patents are overturned
16. Evidence
17. 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.