The water frame

technology · earth · Derbyshire and Lancashire, England

A roller-drafting spinning machine patented by Richard Arkwright in 1769, drawing the roving between successive pairs of rollers turning at increasing speeds and twisting it on a flyer. It produced yarn strong enough for warp, which the jenny could not, and it made an all-cotton cloth possible in Britain for the first time — until then British "cottons" were mixed fabrics with a linen warp. Its second property mattered more than its first: it was too heavy and too continuous for a cottage, and needed a constant power source, so it pulled spinning out of the household and into a building beside a river. The factory, in other words, arrives with the water frame and not with the steam engine, which is why the earliest mill sites are on Pennine and Derbyshire streams rather than on coalfields. Arkwright's patents were overturned in litigation in 1785, after which the design spread rapidly and without licence.