Technology

Abstract

A GREAT deal of interest has attached to the mechanisation of the cotton industry because it is seen as a starting point of the modern technique of production that we call the factory system. Spinning was traditionally a simple handicraft consisting of only two motions, stretching then twisting the clean combed cotton fibres, and it proved relatively easy to imitate this activity with a machine. The earliest invention in economic use, James Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, simply replicated the work of a number of spinners, and it was sufficiently small to be located in the workers’ homes or in adjacent workshops [6:42–4]. The vital economic advance took place when this machine, and rivals invented or patented by Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton, had grown to a size that made manual operation too laborious. Power had to be introduced and the workers became machine minders rather than machine operatives [11: 114–26; 16: 176–9].