The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen · 31 May 2010 · 420pp · 124,202 words
flash, Hargreaves imagined25 a line of spindles, upright and side by side, spinning multiple threads simultaneously. Nearly fifty years later, the first description of the spinning jenny (“jenny” is a dialect term for “engine” in Lancashire) appeared in the September 1807 issue of The Athenaeum, in which readers learned that the first
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he certainly borrowed it, from a Lancashire reed maker and weaver named Thomas Highs, who may even have a claim on the invention of the spinning jenny (Highs’s daughter, Jane,33 always maintained that it was named for her). Whatever his contribution to the jenny, he was clearly responsible for the
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in Spitalfields attacked engines (not, of course, steam-powered) able to multiply the efforts of a single worker. Not only was Richard Hargreaves’s original spinning jenny destroyed57 in 1767, but so also was his new and improved version in 1769. Nor was the phenomenon exclusively British. Machine breaking in France was
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only close to England but the most “English” region of France, was the site of dozens of incidents in 1789 alone. In July, hundreds of spinning jennys were destroyed, along with a French version of Arkwright’s water frame. In October, an attorney in Rouen applauded the destruction of “the machines used
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to ideas whose benefits spilled over into the economy soon after they had enriched their creator. An idea—a separate condenser, for example, or a spinning jenny—might be costly for one inventor to develop, but it wasn’t long (not even the fourteen years of a patent) before it became de
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populations, literate and otherwise, of France, Germany, Italy, and Britain combined. How is it possible that not one of them was capable of inventing a spinning jenny? The only difference between Hargreaves’s invention and the machine used by Chinese cotton spinners, for example, was the draw bar, a device whose “fingers
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territory, nor politics, nor even science is as powerful as culture in explaining China’s inability to produce its own steam engines, puddling furnaces, or spinning jennys. Bertrand Russell translated the Chinese term24 wu wei (usually “doing without effort”) as “production without possession”—a simplification, no doubt, but one with some powerful
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soon as Arkwright’s patent expired” Ibid. 56 In 1551 Parliament passed legislation Mokyr, Lever of Riches. 57 Not only was Richard Hargreaves’s original spinning jenny destroyed Jeff Horn, “Machine-breaking in England and France During the Age of Revolution,” Labour/Travail 55, Spring 2005. 58 Normandy in particular Ibid. 59
Empire of Cotton: A Global History
by Sven Beckert · 2 Dec 2014 · 1,000pp · 247,974 words
. Many artisans tried to find ways to circumvent this bottleneck, and by the 1760s productivity increases became possible with James Hargreaves’s invention of the spinning jenny. The jenny consisted of a hand-operated wheel that would rotate a number of spindles within a frame, while the spinner would use her other
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technology. Way back in 1313, Wang Zhen had written a description of a “machine for spinning hemp thread” that came quite close to Hargreaves’s spinning jenny and Arkwright’s water frame. Developing new spinning machines was certainly within the grasp of Chinese artisans, or, for that matter, their French or Indian
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and rulers lusting for power, the mechanized cotton industry successfully colonized the Wiesental, Valladolid, and an ever-larger swath of the world. In 1771, the spinning jenny came to the French city of Rouen, only six years after it had been introduced in the United Kingdom. In 1783, Johann Gottfried Brügelmann, a
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combination of migration and espionage meant knowledge traveled fast: Arkwright’s carding engine found its way across the Atlantic in eight short years, Hargreaves’s spinning jenny took ten; Arkwright’s water frame took twenty-two years, and Crompton’s mule only eleven. After 1843, when the export of textile machines from
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Kay’s flying shuttle, in 1753 there were attacks on “cotton reel” machines; in 1768–69 workers in Lancashire rioted against the introduction of the spinning jenny, and in 1779 Lancashire workers smashed various kinds of machinery. But machine breaking only became truly prevalent in the 1810s, a moment when the state
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey · 17 Jun 2019 · 626pp · 167,836 words
novelty. Indeed, the novelty of his invention was called into question, as his patent was challenged.12 The other key invention was James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny. Hargreaves is said to have conceived it when he watched a spinning wheel fall to the floor and, while revolving, seem to do the spinning
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scientific breakthroughs. Its great advantage over the spinning wheel it replaced was that it allowed a single worker to spin several threads simultaneously. Although the spinning jenny was around seventy times more expensive than a spinning wheel, it was still much cheaper than building an Arkwright mill; it took up little space
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setting.13 The fact that it didn’t require much alteration to the production process was probably one reason for its rapid adoption. Though the spinning jenny did not facilitate the rise of the factory system directly, it did so indirectly. Samuel Crompton, who began spinning with a jenny as a boy
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, whose wages were lower, and who soon acquired great dexterity.”46 Arkwright’s first mills were almost entirely filled with young children, and Hargreaves’s spinning jenny was brought to such perfection that a child was able to work 80 to 120 spindles.47 As the number of spindles on cotton spinning
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savings of Arkwright’s inventions, see Allen, 2009a, The British Industrial Revolution, chapter 8. 13. R. C. Allen, 2009d, “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature: The Spinning Jenny in Britain, France, and India,” Journal of Economic History 69 (4): 901–27. 14. J. Humphries, 2013, “The Lure of Aggregates and the Pitfalls of
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and Problems, edited by Alan Bowman and Andrew Wilson, 327–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Allen, R. C. 2009d. “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature: The Spinning Jenny in Britain, France, and India.” Journal of Economic History 69 (4): 901–27. Allen, R. C. 2017. “Lessons from History for the Future of Work
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; light bulb, 2; mariner’s compass, 50; movable-type printing press, 47; nailed horseshoe, 43; navigable submarine, 52; personal computer (PC), 231; power loom, 105; spinning jenny, 102; steam digester, 55; steam engine, 52, 76; stirrup, 43; stocking-frame knitting machine, 54, 76; submarine, 73; telescope, 59; transistor, 231; typewriter, 161–62
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of, 265 socialism in America, 272 social media, 285 socioeconomic segregation, 26 Solow, Robert, 4, 180, 206, 325 speech recognition technology, 306 Spence, Michael, 292 spinning jenny, 102 spousal employment, 240 Sprague, Frank J., 152 steam engine: development of, 73; economic virtuosity of, 107; impact of on aggregate growth, 136; universal application
Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy
by Christopher Mims · 13 Sep 2021 · 385pp · 112,842 words
to hire hundreds of thousands of seasonal employees every year and, whatever their background, turn them into productive associates within a day or two. The spinning jenny, Jacquard loom, and numerical machine tool, all milestones in the industrialization of manufacturing, took knowledge that used to be in the heads of skilled craftspeople
Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant · 25 Sep 2023 · 524pp · 154,652 words
knit goods. Invented in Nottingham in 1589. Handloom: Machine used to weave woollen and cotton cloth. The earliest looms date to the fifth century BCE. Spinning jenny: Invented by James Hargreaves in 1764, the device reduced the labor required to spin wool into yarn. Water frame: Patented by Richard Arkwright in 1769
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, the machine applied waterpower to the design of the spinning jenny and further automated the process of producing yarn. Gig mill: Also called the gigging machine, this device automatically raised the nap of woven fabric to
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device that let a single weaver, instead of two, work a broadloom. In the 1760s, a weaver and cotton spinner named James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which let a single worker spin multiple threads into yarn with the crank of a handle—previously it took six. Just a couple years later
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skilled workers fair wages. After weeks of fruitless negotiation, the stockingers smashed a hundred of the hosiers’ machines. In 1768, after James Hargreaves unveiled his spinning jenny, a band of cotton spinners broke into his shop and destroyed it. He’d developed the device in secret, fearing precisely this outcome, and was
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spinners, who had also worked at home, also with their families, had just seen their livelihoods wiped out en masse by automation technologies like the spinning jenny and the water frame. “Hand spinners were the most numerous industrial employees right across Europe,” one economic historian noted. “They’ve been forgotten, because they
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was much in the air, and many men up and down Lancashire were working at it,” Arkwright’s biographer notes. James Hargreaves had invented the spinning jenny, a machine that allowed a single worker to create eight threads of yarn simultaneously—though they were not very strong—in 1767. Working with one
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into yarn—was automated first, decades before the rise of the Luddites. This automation had been resisted, too, if less visibly—the inventor of the spinning jenny, James Hargreaves, had seen his home attacked as early as the 1760s, and Richard Arkwright himself had faced so much opposition that he moved a
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was a small industry in Britain in the early 18th century. By the end, it was a force gathering nearly unstoppable steam. Thanks to the spinning jenny, the water frame, and the power loom, England gained the ability to process cotton into cloth products at an unparalleled pace and scale. Wool had
How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets
by Andy Kessler · 13 Jun 2005 · 218pp · 63,471 words
as could be. But as weavers demanded more yarn of higher quality, they substituted cotton from the New World for expensive wool. Along came the Spinning Jenny. Invented in 1764 by James Hargreaves, it combined eight and eventually 80 spindles of wool into a thread strong enough to sew with. Hargreaves got
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cottages to figure out that automation creates plenty of new jobs. Still, the yarn from a Water Frame was thick and the thread from the Spinning Jenny was coarse. One can only imagine how itchy clothing was in 1775, not just clothes from wool but cotton as well. Royalty still insisted on
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson · 15 Nov 2016 · 322pp · 88,197 words
warm and dry and protected from potential threats. The fact that so much technological innovation—from the first knitting needles to hand looms to the spinning jenny—has emerged out of textile production can seem, at first glance, more a matter of necessity’s invention. And yet the archeological record is replete
The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris · 1 Jan 2012 · 456pp · 123,534 words
to have remembered the mills with fondness. The first Waltham mill started operations in February 1815 with twenty-three yarn-making machines—carders, rovers, and spinning jennies of various kinds—and twenty-one looms, seven wide and fourteen narrow ones. The initial machinery was rapidly added to, replaced, and rebuilt, as operations
Makers
by Chris Anderson · 1 Oct 2012 · 238pp · 73,824 words
just such a machine from spare wood, with the spindles connected by a series of belts and pulleys. Many versions later, he had invented the spinning jenny, a pedal-powered device that could allow a single operator to spin eight threads at the same time (jenny was Lancashire slang for “machine”). The
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the world, even more so once the expanding British trade empire brought bales of the stuff from India, Egypt, and the New World. Second, the spinning jenny, being driven by a series of belts and pulleys, was designed to distribute power from a central point to any number of mechanisms operating in
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a radical transformation in the process of invention itself.14 In June 1770, Hargreaves submitted a patent application, number 962, for a version of the spinning jenny that could spin, draw, and twist sixteen threads simultaneously. The delay between this patent application and his first prototypes meant that others were already using
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was granted, making it difficult for him to enforce his patent rights. Even worse, the machine made enemies. Starting in Hargreaves’s native Lancashire, the spinning jenny’s magical multiplication of productivity was initially, as you might expect, little welcomed by the local artisans, whose guilds had controlled production for centuries—they
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time and energy, which could be invested in such things as building towns, inventing money, learning to read and write, and so on. What the spinning jenny and its kin had created was an inflection point in the arc of history, a radical shift in the economic status quo. It elevated our
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thrive in the new world of distributed manufacturing. Ironically, this is almost a return to the very earliest days of the First Industrial Revolution. The spinning jenny changed the world not by creating the manufacturing plant, but by creating the cottage industry. And the cottage industry can be a very powerful economic
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or cheap to buy, and could be operated in a table-sized space. In a sense, they were the “desktop manufacturing” of the day. The spinning jenny was used in the home, multiplying the work of one spinner manyfold, and for the first time making indoor work more lucrative than outdoor work
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desktop production tools, best suited for hundreds or a few thousand pieces. That speaks to another key principle of the Maker Movement: As with the spinning jenny over two hundred years ago, the technology to create and design new products is available to anyone today. You don’t need to invest in
Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies · 4 Sep 2019 · 412pp · 128,042 words
US at today’s minimum wage using the technology of the eighteenth century it would cost more than $4,000 to produce.) Hargreaves’ machine, the Spinning Jenny, was a frame on which one spinner could fill eight spools of yarn, boosting their output hugely. Fearful about their jobs and wages, a group
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AI shows that it is one to take seriously. Robots’ artificial brains are powered by transistors that sit on computer chips and, just as the Spinning Jenny did, chips are improving at an astonishing rate. In 1965 Gordon Moore, then 36, predicted that computer chips would double in power every two years
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make a case: the X-Road data-exchange system is now seen as the ‘backbone’ of the country and is like a threshing machine or Spinning Jenny for the modern economy. The digitization of government services means that human-to-human interactions – which involve booking appointments, travel and queuing – have been cut
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(1968); for a more recent account of the use of violence in this period, see Griffin (2010). The Industrial Revolution On the role of the Spinning Jenny in the Industrial Revolution, see Allen (2007). For a history of cotton innovation and the UK in the context of Indian and Chinese cotton production
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and the failure to predict new types of employment, see Mokyr et al. (2015). REFERENCES Allen, R. C. (2007), ‘The Industrial Revolution in Miniature: The Spinning Jenny in Britain, France, and India’, Economics Series Working Papers 375, University of Oxford, Department of Economics. Almi, P. (1996), ‘Estonia’s Economy Takes Off’, Unitas
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, 214, 220, 227, 233, 247, 319, 373 Spain 115, 137, 213, 222, 227, 243, 331 Spice (synthetic cannabis) 352 Spice Islands 17 Spiers, Alexander 181 Spinning Jenny 267, 269, 274, 378 Sri Lanka 15, 17, 49 Stanley, Henry Morton 148–9 Stanyforth, Disney 266 Starship Technologies 262–4, 269, 280 stateless people
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