Brilliant as these achievements were, the hand loom remained the crude embodiment of the simple principles of weaving until near the dawn of the nineteenth century, when, by the invention of Cartwright, a period of development was introduced in all lines of textile manufacture unsurpassed in the annals of industrial progress. The first great stride, and that which opened the door for further advance, was the creation of the spinning-jenny, in England, by Hargreaves, about 1767, whereby eight or ten yarns could be spun at one time. Drawing rollers were subsequently added by Arkwright, and then traverse motion was given the bobbins in order to automatically build the yarn into a cop. It has developed since that the drawing-rollers constituted one of the most important fundamental improvements in the spinning art. Their function was to draw out the fibres into a proper size of roving, and to feed this to be spun. Without them the modern spinning-frame would not have been possible. Arkwright’s drawing-rollers and Hargreaves’s spinning-jenny combined under the invention of Crompton to produce, in principle at least, the modern spinning-mule.
DISTAFF AND SPINDLE.
Fairly good machines were thus provided on the advent of the nineteenth century for spinning unlimited quantities of yarn, but this, in turn, required proper loom structures to use the same and a corresponding supply of raw material. Inventive genius was abroad, and the necessity met by Eli Whitney, who, while at the home of General Greene, of Georgia, built the first practical machine for separating cotton fibre from its seed.
Whitney’s gin was constructed on the broad and simple principle that cotton fibre could be drawn through a smaller space than the attached seed, and this same principle is the soul and spirit of every saw-gin of the present day. Prior to Whitney’s gin, cotton fibre was separated from the seed by hand, a day’s work being represented by two or three pounds of cleaned fibre. The daily product of the gin now reaches between three and four thousand pounds.
SPINNING WHEEL.
Such figures demonstrate the important position taken by the cotton gin among the developing agents of the cotton growing States. It has rendered possible and profitable the cultivation of large districts of otherwise waste lands; it has stimulated cotton production; given employment to thousands of idle hands; cheapened the price of cotton cloths, and placed within the reach of the humblest people wearing apparel of fine and beautiful texture.
Unlimited supply of raw material being thus provided, attention reverted to perfecting the machines for spinning it, and under the magical touch of Richard Roberts, of Manchester, England, in 1830, the crude mule of Crompton took practical shape. He gave to it the quadrant winding motion, provided for the harmonious working of the counter and copping faller wires, perfected the “backing off” and “drawing up” mechanisms, and gave attention to construction of details that placed the mule before the world as a practical success.
Equipped in its present form, the self-acting mule presents one of the most striking examples of complex automatic mechanisms that can be found in the industrial world. The work of the attendant is confined to piecing broken ends and supplying roving, the machine passing through the entire cycle of its complicated movements without human direction. An idea may be had of its delicate and accurate operation when it is considered that one pound of cotton has been spun by it into a thread one hundred and sixty-seven miles long. Improvements have been made, indeed, on Roberts’s mule, but aside from changes in details and form, the machine, as it left the hands of this mechanical genius in 1830, remains unchanged.