The machine could not only produce hundreds of spindles of yarn at once, but also yarns of different types and qualities.īut like many new inventions of the Age of Revolution, the spinning mule was so efficient, it threatened the livelihoods of the skilled workers of the cottage industries. Crompton’s spinning mule combined features of the moving carriage of the spinning Jenny with the Arkwright frame’s rollers. A year later, Richard Arkwright introduced a spinning frame powered by water and incorporating rollers to compress and stretch the yarns. In 1764, James Hargreaves invented the ‘spinning Jenny’, which could produce eight spools of yarn at once. At this time, spinning was changing from a ‘cottage industry’, undertaken by families in their own homes, producing one spool at a time, to being an increasingly mechanised process of mass-production. When his father died, young Samuel helped to increase his family’s income by spinning – producing long, strong lengths of thread ready for sewing, knitting or to be woven into cloth. Samuel Crompton (1753 – 1827) was born in Bolton, Lancashire.

Power loom industrial revolution