There are two essential principles in the art of spinning: first, the drawing out of uniform quantities of fiber in a continuous manner; and second, the twisting of the fiber so as to give it coherency and strength. The earliest spinning apparatus, and for ages the only one, was the distaff and spindle. The former was a staff upon which was loosely bound a bundle of the fiber to be spun. It was held in the left hand or was fastened in the belt. The spindle, a tapering rod smaller than the distaff, was held in the right hand. The rotation of the spindle gave the necessary twist to the thread, and around the spindle the thread was wound as it was twisted. The next development in spinning machinery was the spinning-wheel, which has continued in use in some rural parts of the world practically to the present day.
The series of inventions that overthrew hand spinning, and made this industry possible on a large scale, really began in 1738 when Lewis Paul, an English inventor, discovered a process for drawing out and attenuating threads of wool or cotton by passing the fiber through successive pairs of rollers. To-day this principle forms a fundamental feature of all spinning machinery. In 1764 James Hargreaves, an illiterate weaver and carpenter of Lancashire, England, invented the spinning-jenny, a device by which eight threads could be spun at once. With a little improvement in this invention, eighty threads were produced as easily as eight. The idea of the spinning-jenny is said to have been accidentally suggested to its inventor by watching the motions of a common spinning-wheel which one of his children had unintentionally upset.
Hargreaves is another in the long list of those who have suffered persecution because of having done something to make the world better. His fellow-spinners, filled with prejudice toward his invention because they feared it might rob them of employment, broke into his house and destroyed his machine. He then moved to Nottingham, where he erected a spinning mill. In 1770 Hargreaves took out a patent on his invention, but the patent was subsequently annulled on the ground that he had sold a few machines before patenting the invention.
Valuable as was the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves, it was adapted only to producing the transverse threads, or the woof. It could not produce sufficient firmness and hardness for the longitudinal threads, or the warp. In 1767 Richard Arkwright, another native of Lancashire, invented the spinning-frame, which was able to yield a thread fine enough and firm enough to make the warp. At the time of his invention Arkwright was so poor that he had to be furnished with a suit of clothes before he looked respectable enough to appear at an election. Like Hargreaves, he also was persecuted. Both were driven out of Lancashire to Nottingham to escape popular rage. Arkwright's patent was annulled, and at one time his factory was destroyed by the populace in the presence of a powerful military and police force, who did nothing to restrain it. And why were Hargreaves and Arkwright driven out of Lancashire? They had invented machines that would produce more and cheaper clothing; that would give powerful impetus to the cotton and the woolen industries; that would lift the race higher in the path-way of civilization. What was the reason? Misunderstanding, prejudice, and selfishness. The interests of the few were shutting out the interests of the world. And these interests of the few were imaginary.