James Hargreaves c1720-1778
James Hargreaves was born near Blackburn at a farm on the moors above Oswaldtwistle (the exact location is unknown). Relatively little is known about his early life, apart from the fact that he was a handloom weaver, unable to read or write, but with an interest in carpentry and engineering. Details of his marriage and the birth of his children have been gleaned from the Parish Registers of Church Kirk.
In the 1760s Hargreaves and his family lived at Stanhill where they spun on a spinning wheel and wove on a handloom. James had a keen interest in streamlining the various processes used in the production of cotton cloth - his first innovations improved the process of hand-carding, where the tangled fibres of cotton are teased out between two hand-held combs. Hargreaves' 'stock-card' featured a wooden bench or 'stock' covered with carding wires, which allowed far more cotton to be carded by one person at once.
However, James Hargreaves' most famous invention was the Spinning Jenny, a machine which took the traditional spinning wheel and turned it 90 degrees to a horizontal position, allowing it to spin multiple spindles at once. Debate still rages as to the origin of the name 'jenny'. It is often claimed that Hargreaves' daughter Jenny knocked over an old spinning wheel one day, giving James the idea for his machine - sadly, this is just a romantic myth: the Registers of Church Kirk show that Hargreaves had several daughters, but none named Jenny (neither was his wife). The word 'jenny' is in fact an early abbreviation of 'engine', simply referring to a machine or device.
The original machine was produced some time between 1764 and 1767. It featured eight spindles onto which the cotton thread was spun from a corresponding set of rovings (roughly spun cotton). This had a dramatic effect on the amount of thread that could be spun by a single person, although the early machines produced thread that was coarse and broke easily, only really suitable for the weft of a handloom (that which travels horizontally in the shuttle).
Hargreaves may have been a talented inventor, but he was not a shrewd businessman. He didn't apply for a patent for his Spinning Jenny until 1770, by which time many others had copied his ideas, reaping the rewards that were rightly his.
Although Hargreaves originally produced the machine for family use, news of his invention gradually spread across the industrial North. In Lancashire, traditional hand spinners saw the Spinning Jenny as a threat to their livelihood. They realised that the machine could produce spun cotton thread far quicker and more cheaply than their traditional method. An angry mob marched to Hargreaves' workshop, destroying his equipment and forcing him to leave the county. He moved to Nottingham and built a small spinning-mill, using his Jennies. Although this venture was not particularly successful, Hargreaves continued to refine the Jenny increasing the number of threads from eight to eighty.
By the time of his death in 1778, over 20,000 of Hargreaves' Spinning-Jenny machines were being used in Britain, but despite being credited with the invention of this remarkable machine, James only received very modest financial returns and died in relative poverty.
Stanhill Post Office