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.