IN the 1760s, John Kay’s new ‘flying shuttle’ looms allowed Colchester’s weavers to double their output.* More cloth at lower prices promised full order-books and new jobs across the textile industry, but spinning was still a laborious handicraft, and could not supply enough yarn. The new looms fell silent, and unemployed weavers smashed them, sending Kay in fear to Paris.
James Hargreaves of Blackburn was more creative. One day in 1764, they say, his children knocked over his wife’s spinning wheel, and in his mind’s eye Hargreaves saw a machine with eight vertical spindles, rather than a single horizontal one. Soon his historic ‘spinning jenny’* was keeping looms busy with cheap yarn, and although cottage industry spinners vandalised his machines too, the bottleneck was cleared and the spinning jenny brought new jobs, better wages and a rising standard of living.*
Yet Hargreaves himself made no fortune from his historic invention. The courts found that he had left it too late to take out a patent.*
John Kay (1704-1779) of Walmersley near Bury, who set up his business in Colchester in 1733. He should not be confused with John Kay, a clockmaker from Warrington, who in 1767 constructed a different kind of machine, a spinning frame with rollers, for Richard Arkwright.
The origin of Hargreaves’s name for his device remains a mystery: neither James’s wife nor any of his daughters (he had thirteen children) appears to have been christened Jenny. Some have surmised that it is a corruption of ‘engine’.
The weavers smashed Kay’s looms because the shortage of yarn raised its price, as demand outstripped supply. Conversely, Hargreaves’s spinning jenny made the price of yarn drop, as supply kept up with demand. This pleased the weavers but angered the spinners, who did not realise that by producing more for less using machines they could still come out ahead.
Hargreaves sold some machines before taking out his patent, which a court held to have invalidated it. Thomas Highs of Leigh, who collaborated with John Kay of Warrington on carding machines, claimed that he had invented the spinning jenny himself, but the courts dismissed his complaint. In 1769 Richard Arkwright patented a vastly improved version, the water-powered spinning frame, amid some controversy, during which he testified that Hargreaves was the original inventor of the spinning jenny.
Précis
The spread of the flying shuttle loom in the 1760s meant that weavers could make cloth faster than hand wheels could supply yarn. The spinning jenny devised by James Hargreaves in 1764 accelerated production, and reduced the price of yarn, sparking a revolution in the textile industry, and proving that contrary to widespread fears automation benefited the economy. (57 / 60 words)