THE INVENTION of the flying shuttle, which speeded up the weaving of cloth, concentrated men's thoughts on ways of increasing output of cotton thread, which was turning into a major bottleneck as weavers snapped it up as fast as it could be made.
Spinning is a relatively simple series of actions in which cotton fibres, each just a few centimetres long, are stretched and twisted together to form a single, strong thread. The problem lay in mechanising the process to make it faster and labour-efficient.
For centuries, yarn had been spun in the home using the spinning wheel, a device that allowed the spinster to draw out the fibres by hand before producing the vital, strengthening twist.
In the great wheel, the operator held the stretched thread at such an angle that it fell away from the tip of the rotating spindle in loops, each turn of the spindle producing one twist in the thread.When enough twist had been applied to the length of thread, the spinster lowered her hand and the cotton was wound onto the spindle. In the later Saxony Wheel, this operation became continuous thanks to an ingenious flyer mechanism, which automatically put in the twist as it revolved around the spindle. The rotation of the flyer automatically twisted the thread before winding it onto the bobbin.
It sounds simple enough. But when men sat down and tried to automate this process, they quickly realised that the problem was not quite that easy to solve.
They saw that the operation had two parts - stretching the raw cotton and, almost simultaneously, twisting the fibres by just the right amount. To the spinster it was an art - she had done it by touch and experience, knowing just how much tension to put on the roving as it passed through her fingers. A machine couldn't think or feel, so it would require a different method. It became a matter of pure mathematics and mechanics.
Within a year of the flying shuttle's invention, Lewis Paul and John Wyatt had come up with what was to prove the eventual solution - differential rollers.
In their machine, the roving was passed between two sets of twin rollers, the second set turning probably five times faster
CUT-DOWN version of an early mule. The rail along which the carriage runs out can be seen in the foreground.
It was an elegant idea, but the technologyu was just a little ahead of its time. Wyatt and Paul tried desperately to make it work, but finished up sadder, wiser and bankrupt.
It would be years before the idea of rollers resurfaced. In the meantime, a man named Thomas Highs, from Leigh in Lancashire, came up with another idea. His Spinning Jenny was like a glorified spinning wheel which, initially, could stretch and spin six separate yarns at once.
The process was discontinuous. It featured a moveable clamp, which grip[ped the cotton roving and was pulled back by the operator to stretch the yarn, before the spinning operation was performed - using angled spindles. Just as in the old-fashioned spinning wheel, the twist was derived from the thread falling from the spindle tip.