James Hargreaves was a Lancashire weaver who traditionally has been credited with the invention of the ‘‘spinning jenny,’’ a device that facilitated the processing of an increasing quantity of harvested cotton. Some historians have reassessed Hargreaves’s role as an inventor, claiming that Thomas Highs, a poor artisan from Leigh, had actually designed and built the spinning machine in 1763 or 1764 several years before Hargreaves’s model burst on the scene. Highs, however, had no money to secure a patent and merely rented several models before eventually abandoning his invention. Others claim that Hargreaves received credit for the spinning jenny simply because the unscrupulous early industrialist Richard Arkwright found it beneficial to recognize his machine. Whether Hargreaves was indeed either the inventor or improver of the spinning jenny or merely lucky through his association with Arkwright is of little consequence. His persistence in perfecting and initially marketing the spinning jenny are proof enough of his significant contribution to the Industrial Revolution, and it is likely his name will forever be wedded to the invention.
Hargreaves had no formal education and never learned to read or write. He eventually became a carpenter and weaver, as in his era the agricultural lifestyle meant that he derived his income from farming and weaving cloth. In 1740 he married a local woman and the couple had thirteen children, with his girls likely helping him to spin thread for his loom. Hargreaves most assuredly experienced the same frustration as others who had placed John Kay’s flying shuttle on their looms. The family could not keep pace and supply him with sufficient thread. Legend has it that Jenny, one of Hargreaves daughters, inadvertently knocked over a spinning wheel and as the spindle tumbled and rolled across the floor, Hargreaves had the inspiration for the spinning jenny. However, local records do not confirm that Hargreaves had a daughter by that name. More likely, the word is simply one that evolved from ‘‘gin,’’ a shortened version of the word engine.
Hargreaves first machine appeared in 1767; his main tool for its construction being a simple hand knife. He turned the traditional spinning wheel 90 degrees to a horizontal position so that it could operate multiple spindles at once. His first jenny had eight spindles, an improvement over Highs’s six, and other versions soon followed. A moving carriage bearing the spindles stretched the thread as it pulled away from the body of the machine, simultaneously creating a twist to the cotton. The spindles wound up the thread as the carriage returned and then the process repeated itself. The thread produced by his jenny was coarse and broke easily, but the machine dramatically increased the amount of thread that a single person could spin. The single wheel on the spinning jenny controlled the spindles—initially eight and later up to eighty. Family and friends quickly began using his models. Unfortunately, financial success did not follow. The courts rejected his first patent because he had made and sold several machines outside the patent application window.
Hargreaves’s jenny performed the work of eight people and thus decreased the need for labor. As a result, the early reaction to his invention was negative. In 1768 neighbors who were spinners and had witnessed the early success of the machine felt fear and jealousy. An angry mob gathered and marched to a barn and destroyed twenty of Hargreaves’s machines under construction and then continued on to his residence. If legend is correct, the rioters forced Hargreaves to use a hammer and personally destroy one of his spinning jennies. Afterwards, Hargreaves fled to Nottingham where there was a warmer reception for new technology. He built a small spinning mill and refined the jenny but became increasingly frustrated at his inability to obtain a patent. By this time, carpenters in Lancashire had built scores of replicas of his machine and increased the number of threads to eighty or more. His patent rejected and dreams in shambles, Hargreaves died in relative obscurity in 1778. By the time of his death it is estimated that 20,000 jennies were operating in England.
The impact of Hargreaves’s invention was dramatic. The spinning jenny fit perfectly into the framework of the existing domestic textile industry. The machine was cheap to construct, small enough to fit into a cottage, easy to operate (even for a child), and the spinners could now keep pace with the weavers. It became the foundation upon which later textile technology developed. In the early 1790s Richard Arkwright had put the water frame into mass operation, and soon Samuel Crompton married the best parts of the two machines to produce his ‘‘mule’’ and the textile industry soared. Cotton yarn exports increased more than three-fold from the 1760s to 1780 and by the early 19th century was ten times that produced in the 1780s. Thus, James
Hargreaves’s jenny ended the reliance on the ancient spinning wheel and opened the door for the major developments in the English textile industry in the early phase of the Industrial Revolution.
World History
