Even though innovation is obviously cumulative, there
was a distinct acceleration in the middle of the eighteenth
century. In no place was this more visible than in textile
production. The most basic operation in the production of
textiles is spinning, which involves taking plant or animal
fibers, such as cotton or wool, and twisting them together to
form yarn. This yarn is then woven to make up textiles. One
of the great technological innovations of the medieval
period was the spinning wheel, which replaced hand
spinning. This invention appeared around 1280 in Europe,
probably disseminating from the Middle East. The methods
of spinning did not change until the eighteenth century.
Significant innovations began in 1738, when Lewis Paul
patented a new method of spinning using rollers to replace
human hands to draw out the fibers being spun. The
machine did not work well, however, and it was the
innovations of Richard Arkwright and James Hargreaves
that truly revolutionized spinning.
In 1769 Arkwright, one of the dominant figures of the
Industrial Revolution, patented his “water frame,” which was
a huge improvement over Lewis’s machine. He formed a
partnership with Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need, who
were hosiery manufacturers. In 1771 they built one of the
world’s first factories, at Cromford. The new machines were
powered by water, but Arkwright later made the crucial
transition to steam power. By 1774 his firm employed six
hundred workers, and he expanded aggressively,
eventually setting up factories in Manchester, Matlock,
Bath, and New Lanark in Scotland. Arkwright’s innovations
were complemented by Hargreaves’s invention in 1764 of
the spinning jenny, which was further developed by Samuel
Crompton in 1779 into the “mule,” and later by Richard
Roberts into the “self-acting mule.” The effects of these
innovations were truly revolutionary: earlier in the century, it
took 50,000 hours for hand spinners to spin one hundred
pounds of cotton. Arkwright’s water frame could do it in 300
hours, and the self-acting mule in 135.
Along with the mechanization of spinning came the
mechanization of weaving. An important first step was the
invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733. Though it
initially simply increased the productivity of hand weavers,
its most enduring impact would be in opening the way to