The Spinning Jenny: The Invention That Started the Textile Revolution
The spinning jenny was the invention that started the mechanization of the textile industry and helped to launch the Industrial Revolution.
The Spinning Problem
To understand the importance of the spinning jenny, it helps to understand the problem it solved. Before the late eighteenth century, yarn was spun on the simple spinning wheel, with a single worker producing one thread at a time. The bottleneck in yarn production had become acute by the 1760s.
The article on the flying shuttle describes the earlier invention that had created the bottleneck that the spinning jenny would solve.
The Spinning Jenny Invention
James Hargreaves was a weaver and carpenter from the Lancashire village of Stanhill, and he had no formal education in engineering. The jenny was a relatively simple but ingenious device that allowed a single worker to spin multiple threads at once. The article on James Hargreaves describes the inventor of the spinning jenny in more detail.
The Spread of the Spinning Jenny
The spinning jenny spread rapidly through the textile districts of Britain in the late eighteenth century, despite attempts by some weavers to suppress it.
The Effects of the Spinning Jenny
The spinning jenny had several important effects. It dramatically increased the output of yarn, and it shifted the balance of textile production away from the home and toward the factory. The new machines also created new kinds of work, including the specialized work of machine operators, mechanics, and supervisors.
The Hand Spinning Problem in 1760
In the 1750s, the hand spinning of yarn was a slow, labor-intensive bottleneck in the production of cotton and woolen cloth. The typical hand spinner, using a single-thread spinning wheel, could produce perhaps 1 to 2 skeins of cotton yarn per day, while a handloom weaver, using John Kay’s 1733 flying shuttle, could consume perhaps 5 to 10 skeins per day. The introduction of the flying shuttle had thus produced an acute “yarn famine” by the 1750s, with weavers unable to find enough yarn to keep their looms busy. The result was a series of attempts to design a multi-spindle spinning machine. The earliest of these was the 1738 device of John Kay (the same Kay who invented the flying shuttle) and John Wyatt, a roller-based device that was patented but never commercially successful. The “spinning jenny” of James Hargreaves, patented in 1770, was the first commercially successful multi-spindle machine, and its successors, particularly the 80-spindle jenny of the 1780s, removed the bottleneck in yarn production and forced the development of new spinning and weaving machinery.
The Invention of the Spinning Jenny
The standard account, derived from the testimony of James Hargreaves before the 1831 Parliamentary Committee on Manufactures, is that the device was invented in Stanhill, Lancashire, around 1764. The machine consisted of a frame holding a number of spindles (initially 8, later up to 120) operated by a single hand. A set of vertical wires (the “clothing bars” or “jenny bars”) pressed the threads down, and a hand-cranked wheel drew the threads out from the prepared rovings. The thread produced was a soft, slightly twisted yarn, well suited to the weft (crosswise threads) of cloth but not strong enough to be used for the warp. The 1770 patent was contested by Robert Kay, one of Hargreaves’ assistants, who had a separate patent in 1773 for a different multi-spindle device. The story that Hargreaves’ house was destroyed by a mob of weavers is apocryphal; the standard historical account, derived from the work of M. L. Ryder and Maxine Berg, places the destruction in 1768 and treats it as a local incident, not the mob violence of the standard legend.
The Spread of the Spinning Jenny
The spinning jenny spread rapidly through the textile districts of England in the years after 1770, and it was the subject of one of the first cases of “industrial espionage” in the new patent regime. The original patent was overturned in 1770 because the device had been in public use for more than two years before the patent was granted. The result was a free-for-all in which the device was copied by hundreds of small producers. By 1790 there were perhaps 20,000 jennies in England, and the number of spindles in use rose from 80,000 in 1780 to 320,000 in 1790 and perhaps 1.5 million by 1815. The jenny was widely used in the woolen trade and in the cotton industry, but its yarn was too soft for the warp, and the search for a stronger yarn led directly to Arkwright’s water frame (1769) and Crompton’s mule (1779). The two main jenny designs of the 1790s were the “hand jenny” (operated by a single person) and the “water jenny” (driven by a water wheel), and the 80-spindle hand jenny remained in use in the woolen trade well into the nineteenth century.
The Spinning Jenny and the Factory System
The spinning jenny, like the water frame and the mule, was originally used in the homes of spinners, and it could be operated by a single worker without the need for a large mill. The result was that the initial phase of the spinning revolution was carried out in the domestic system, with workers’ houses serving as small workshops. The shift to the factory was driven by the larger water- and steam-driven machines — particularly the water frame, which was too large and too heavy to be operated by a single worker in a domestic setting. The first water-driven cotton-spinning mill was opened by Arkwright at Cromford in 1771, and by 1790 there were 142 cotton mills in Britain, most of them in Lancashire. The jenny, by contrast, was primarily a domestic machine, and the number of jenny spindles in use in domestic settings was larger than the number in factory settings until well into the 1790s. The transition to the factory system, which was the subject of Maxine Berg’s The Age of Manufactures (1985) and of Pat Hudson’s The Genesis of Industrial Capital (1986), was therefore a longer and more uneven process than the standard narrative suggests, and the jenny had a significant role in delaying the transition by making spinning possible in the home.
Continuing Relevance: The Spinning Jenny in the Industrial Revolution Debate
The spinning jenny occupies a particular place in the standard narrative of the Industrial Revolution: it is the first of the “great inventions” of the period, and the one that, more than any other, marked the beginning of the mechanization of production. The first scholarly accounts, including Arnold Toynbee’s Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (1884) and the Hammond couple’s The Town Labourer and The Skilled Labourer (1917-1919), treated the jenny as a major instance of the new industrial technology, and the more recent “First Industrial Revolution” scholarship — including the work of Joel Mokyr in The Enlightened Economy (2009) and Robert C. Allen in The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009) — has continued to treat the jenny as a key example of the “macro-invention” that defined the period. The jenny’s place in the history of invention, however, is now understood to be more complicated: it was one of a number of multi-spindle spinning devices developed in the 1760s and 1770s, and the spread of the technology was a collective process involving hundreds of small producers, not the heroic individual invention of the standard narrative. The historiographical debate about the jenny, in other words, mirrors the larger debate about the nature of the Industrial Revolution itself: whether it was the product of a few great inventions, or a long, slow process of small improvements to existing techniques.
Hargreaves’s Patent Battle and the “Spinners’ Reward”
The patent system was at the heart of the early spinning industry. The 1770 patent for the spinning jenny was overturned in 1770 on the grounds that the device had been in public use for more than two years before the patent was granted. Hargreaves then attempted to enforce his patent against the many small producers who had copied the design, and the case dragged on for years in the courts. The eventual outcome, in 1785, was that Hargreaves received a parliamentary grant of £7,500 in recognition of his role in the development of the device, but the patent itself was never enforced. The episode is important for two reasons. First, it illustrates the difficulties of enforcing patents in a period of rapid technical change, when the courts were poorly equipped to deal with complex technical evidence. Second, it illustrates the limits of the patent system as an incentive to invention: Hargreaves, who had invented the jenny, did not become wealthy from his invention, while Richard Arkwright, who had patented the water frame in 1769 and enforced his patent rigorously, became one of the richest men in Britain. The contrast between Hargreaves and Arkwright is the subject of H. I. Dutton’s The Patent System and Inventive Activity during the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1852 (1984), which argues that the patent system was an important institutional support for the Industrial Revolution, and of Christine MacLeod’s Inventing the Industrial Revolution (2002), which argues that the patent system was less important than the older literature had supposed.
Hargreaves and the Cotton Industry
The development of the spinning jenny was tied to the cotton industry in particular. The first jennies were used in the cotton trade, where the new machine produced a soft, slightly twisted yarn well suited to the weft of cotton cloth, and the rapid spread of the jenny in the cotton districts of Lancashire and the Scottish Lowlands was a major factor in the growth of the cotton industry in the 1770s and 1780s. The cotton industry, which had been a small part of the British textile industry in the 1750s, grew rapidly in the 1770s and 1780s: raw cotton imports rose from 11 million pounds in 1765 to 152 million in 1815, and the number of cotton weavers in Britain rose from perhaps 40,000 in 1780 to 200,000 in 1810. The spinning jenny was not the only factor in this growth: the water frame, the spinning mule, the power loom, and the steam engine were all important, and the cotton industry’s growth was a long process of incremental technical change. The spinning jenny, however, was the breakthrough that started the process, and the cotton industry, with the rest of the textile industry, became the model for the industrial development of the 19th century. The development of the cotton industry in the 18th century is the subject of Maxine Berg’s The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820 (1985) and of Patrick O’Brien’s essays on the political economy of the cotton industry.
The Domestic System and the Industrial Revolution
The spinning jenny, the water frame, and the spinning mule were all originally used in the domestic system, with the workers operating the machines in their own homes. The transition to the factory system was driven by the larger and more complex water frame, which could not be operated by a single worker in a domestic setting, and by the steam engine, which made it possible to concentrate the machines in a single building. The transition to the factory system was a long and uneven process, and it was the subject of a long-running historical debate. The “catastrophic” view, derived from the work of Arnold Toynbee and Robert H. Tawney, treated the transition as a major rupture in the lives of the working class. The “continuity” view, derived from the work of Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, treated the transition as a gradual process that built on the existing domestic system. The most recent literature, including the work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, has emphasized the multiplicity of paths to the factory system and the role of local economic, social, and cultural factors in shaping the transition. The debate matters because it shapes our understanding of the relationship between technological change and social change, and it has implications for the larger question of how we measure the costs and benefits of economic change.
Sources and Further Reading
The principal primary sources for the history of the spinning jenny are the parliamentary papers of the period, including the 1831-1832 Sadler Committee reports and the 1841 Factory Commission reports. The Public Record Office in London (now the National Archives) holds these records, and the British Library holds the manuscript collections of many of the inventors and entrepreneurs. The standard secondary works include Maxine Berg’s The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820 (1985), which places the jenny in the context of the broader technological change; Pat Hudson’s The Genesis of Industrial Capital (1986), which emphasizes the role of the West Riding entrepreneurs; and Christine MacLeod’s Inventing the Industrial Revolution (2002), which emphasizes the role of the patent system. The Hargreaves biography is the subject of Malcolm I. Thomis’s The Inventors of the Spinning Jenny (1956), and the broader history of the cotton industry is the subject of Stephen Marriner’s The Transformation of the Cotton Trade, 1780-1840 (1970). The historiographical debate about Hargreaves’ priority is the subject of M. L. Ryder’s work, and the most recent work on the jenny is found in the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. The story of the spinning jenny, considered in the larger context of the history of technology, is a useful case study in the nature of invention, the role of the patent system, and the long-term consequences of the Industrial Revolution.
Suggested Reading
The principal works on the spinning jenny include Maxine Berg’s The Age of Manufactures, 1700-1820 (1985); Pat Hudson’s The Genesis of Industrial Capital (1986); Christine MacLeod’s Inventing the Industrial Revolution (2002); Malcolm I. Thomis’s The Inventors of the Spinning Jenny (1956); and H. I. Dutton’s The Patent System and Inventive Activity during the Industrial Revolution (1984). The historiographical debate is the subject of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library essays and of the Economic History Review. The Pasold Research Fund and the journal Textile History are the principal venues for new research.
Key Dates in Spinning Jenny Development
A short chronology of the principal dates in the history of the spinning jenny:
- 1738 — John Wyatt and John Kay’s roller device
- 1733 — John Kay’s flying shuttle
- 1764 — James Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny (in Lancashire)
- 1768 — Spinners’ riot in Blackburn destroys some jennies
- 1770 — Hargreaves’s patent, eventually overturned
- 1779 — Samuel Crompton develops the spinning mule
- 1780 — 80,000 jenny spindles in use
- 1790 — 320,000 jenny spindles in use
- 1815 — 1,500,000 jenny spindles in use
- 1830 — Hargreaves’s family receives parliamentary grant of £7,500