SPINNING is the art of forming continuous threads by drawing out and twisting together filamentous materials. This was at first a manual art, and was practised in the earliest ages. The simple tool first made use of consisted of a piece of wood, with its lower extremity of a conical form like a boy's top, and its upper portion long and tapering to a point, to which the fibres to be spun were fixed; this was termed a spindle, and in using was spun like a top to twist the threads. To the spindle an addition was soon made of the distaff, consisting of a piece of wood, round which the material to be spun was lapped. The distaff was held in the one hand of the spinner, while the other hand was engaged in drawing the fibres from the mass, and ever and anon giving fresh impetus to the motion of the spindle. This simple apparatus must have been early used, as among the sculptures of the early Egyptian tombs we find representations of females forming threads with the spindle; and singular though it be, the same apparatus may yet be found in a few places in Scotland, affording, in its toilsome progress, a striking contrast to the whirling wonders of the cotton-mill.
A great improvement in the use of the distaff and spindle, by which the spinner's hands were in a great measure left free to regulate the formation of the thread, was made by mounting the spindle in a frame, and using a larger wheel to drive it by a belt; and this again was further improved by using a treadle to effect the movement of the wheel by the foot of the spinner. No attempt, however, to introduce mechanism to supply the place of the skill and dexterity in manipulation, which the spinner could acquire only by assiduous practice, appears to have been made before the beginning of the eighteenth century. At that time there were in common use two kinds of spinning implements. The one, called the large wheel, was used in the spinning of wool and cotton, consisting of a large wheel or rim mounted in a frame, and having a belt to drive the spindle which projected from the side of the frame, and had the material to be spun affixed to its end. In spinning, the operator, usually a female, laid hold of the wool or cotton with the finger and thumb of her left hand, at a few inches distant from the spindle, and
Spinning. drew it towards her, while she turned the wheel with her right hand; she thus extended and twisted repeated portions, and as they were twisted, she, by guiding with her hand the thread she had formed, allowed it to be wound upon the spindle. Thus, from the carded cotton or wool, a loose flabby thread or rove was formed, which was again subjected to a similar drawing or extension, and twisted until reduced to a fine and compact thread. The other implement, called the small or Saxon wheel, was a more perfect apparatus, and was used for the spinning of flax; it had on its spindle a bobbin, on which the thread was wound, and a flyer revolving with greater rapidity than the bobbin, to give the thread twist; a fixed distaff, on which the prepared flax was loosely rolled; and a treadle by which a rotatory motion was given to the wheel by the foot of the operator, whose hands were thus left at liberty to draw out the fibres of the flax in the requisite number to form the thread; in doing this, the fibres were, from time to time, moistened with saliva, to make them more readily combine.
Such were the spinning implements used in Britain and elsewhere, fit companions for the rude looms by which their produce was woven into cloth. But improvements had begun to be made in the apparatus for weaving. The shuttle, which had to be thrown by both hands alternately, and in cloths above thirty-six inches wide, by two men, one at each side, was in 1733 superseded by the fly-shuttle, the invention of John Kay of Bury in Lancashire. By this improvement, the weaver could throw the shuttle from side to side with his right hand; one man could weave the widest fabrics, and could produce nearly twice as much work as by the old method. The spinners could not now supply weft for the weavers, and hence arose the necessity for some machine that would increase the production of yarn.
In 1738, Lewis Paul, the son of a Dr Paul, and who had been left in the guardianship of Lord Shaftesbury and his brother, appears to have been the first who made an attempt to substitute mechanism for the hands and skill of the spinner. To him is due the honour of discovering the principle of roller-spinning, a principle, forty years afterwards, fully developed by the genius of Arkwright. In that year Paul obtained a patent for a machine "for the spinning of wool and cotton in a manner entirely new." Paul had originally some little property acquired by marriage, but while working at his invention he appears to have fallen into poverty, to have become involved in debt, and to have skulked about under assumed names, to avoid his creditors. He had gone to Birmingham to avail himself of the better skill of the workmen there in the construction of his machine, and had borrowed money from Mr Warren, a bookseller, and Mr Wyatt, one of those who worked at the construction of the machine. He was unable to repay this money, but Warren accepted as payment of his £1,100, a license to erect fifty spindles; and Wyatt agreed to take the machine which he had helped to set up in payment of his claim of £800. On his return to London, Paul sold several machines. He confined his attention chiefly, however, to the sale of his licences, in which he was so successful that he was soon enabled to pay off his debts. He lived in comfortable circumstances to the time of his death in 1759.
Although Wyatt does not appear to have set up any claim to the invention of the machine which thus fell into his hands, yet in the following account by his son, Mr Charles Wyatt, the whole merit of the invention is claimed for him.
"In the year 1730, or thereabouts, living then at a village near Litchfield, our respected father first conceived the project, and carried it into effect; and in the year 1733, by a model of about two feet square, in a small building near Sutton Coldfield, without a single witness to the performance, was spun the first thread of cotton ever produced without the intervention of the human fingers, he, the inventor, to use his own words, 'being all the time in a
pleasing, but trembling, suspense.' The wool had been carded in the common way, and was passed between two cylinders, from whence the bobbin drew it by means of the twist.
"This successful experiment induced him to seek for a pecuniary connexion equal to the views that the project excited, and one appeared to present itself with a Mr Lewis Paul, which terminated unhappily for the projector; for Paul, a foreigner, poor and enterprising, made offers and bargains which he never fulfilled, and contrived, in the year 1738, to have a patent taken out in his own name for some additional apparatus, a copy of which I send you; and in 1741, or 1742, a mill turned by two asses walking round an axis was erected in Birmingham, and ten girls were employed in attending the work. Two hanks of the cotton then and there spun are now in my possession, accompanied with the inventor's testimony of the performance. Drawings of the machinery were sent, or appear to have been sent, to Mr Cave, for insertion in the Gentleman's Magazine.
"This establishment, unsupported by sufficient property, languished a short time, and then expired; the supplies were exhausted, and the inventor much injured by the experiment, but his confidence in the scheme was unimpaired. The machinery was sold in 1743. A work upon a larger scale, on a stream of water, was established at Northampton, under the direction of Mr Yeoman, but with the property of Mr Cave. The work contained 250 spindles, and employed fifty pair of hands.
"The work at Northampton did not prosper. It passed, I believe, into the possession of a Mr Yeo, a gentleman of the law, in London, about the year 1764; and, from a strange coincidence of circumstances, there is the highest probability that the machinery got into the hands of a person who, with the assistance of others, knowing how to apply it with skill and judgment, and to supply what might be deficient, raised upon it, by a gradual accession of profit, an immense establishment, and a princely fortune."
Mr Robert Cole, F.S.A., is in possession of documents which, notwithstanding this circumstantial account, clearly prove Paul's title to be considered sole inventor of roller-spinning. The principles of his invention are contained in the following extract from the specification of his patent:—"The wool or cotton being thus prepared (by carding into slivers), one end of the mass, rope, thread, or sliver, is put betwixt a pair of rowlers, cillinders, or cones, or some such movements, which being twined round by their motion, draws in the raw mass of wool or cotton to be spun in proportion to the velocity given so such rowlers, cillinders, or cones. As the prepared mass passes regularly through or betwixt these rowlers, cillinders, or cones, a succession of other rowlers, cillinders, or cones, moving proportionably faster than the first, draw the rope, thread, or sliver, into any degree of fineness which may be required. Sometimes these successive rowlers, cillinders, or cones (but not the first) have another rotation besides that which diminishes the thread, yarn, or worsted, viz., that they give it a small degree of twist betwixt each pair, by means of the thread itself passing through the axis and centre of that rotation. In some other cases only the first pair of rowlers, cillinders, or cones, are used, and then the bobbin, spole, or quill, upon which the thread, yarn, or worsted is spun, is so contrived as to draw faster than the first rowlers, cillinders, or cones give, and in such proportion as the first mass, rope, or sliver is proposed to be diminished."
To appreciate rightly Paul's invention, we must take into consideration the state of the art at his day. No machine, except the household wheels, already described, then existed, and their useful effect depended on the skill and dexterity of the spinner. Paul's invention contained the germ of a self-acting and self-regulating principle; and the means which he used were so unlike any operation perform-
Spinning. ed by the hands, that although unfortunately his success was only partial, he is yet entitled to our admiration for the originality of his genius. He did much for the art, if what he did prepared a foundation for Arkwright's superstructure.
The next invention was one in which an effort was made directly to imitate the action of the spinster, as exemplified in the wool-wheel, in drawing away the roving of wool, until extended to the proper length, and, after having twisted it, winding it on the cope or spindle. This was the "Jenny," the invention of which is claimed by Mr Guest for Thomas Highs, a reed-maker in Leigh near Bolton, but is more generally accorded to James Hargreaves, a weaver, residing at Stanhill village near Blackburn. These ingenious men were doubtless independent inventors, working out their ideas without the knowledge of each other's proceedings, and the difference in their respective machines countenances this view. Mr Guest gives Hargreaves the name of the improver of the jenny.
If we imagine many spindles to be set in motion by one wheel, and the ends of the rovings connected with these to be inserted between two pieces of wood, which, like the jaws of a vice, would hold them firmly, and by which they could all be drawn back at one time by the left hand of the spinner, while with his right hand he could drive the wheel which gives the spindles their motion, we shall have a good idea of the first spinning-jenny, which was, indeed, no more than this. In process of time, however, the machine was rendered very different from the one first constructed. The spindles were increased from eight (the number in Hargreaves's original machine) to eighty, and upwards; the clove or clasp by which the slivers or rovings were held was improved in form, and mounted on a carriage, and made to run on a railway in the framing, the effect of which was more perfect equality of the thread, and a greater degree of precision in the process. The yarn when spun was built up in a conical form on the cope or spindle by a proper apparatus, and altogether the machine was very much improved. Still, with all its improvements, it was only a hand-wheel of many spindles. But as a hand-wheel it probably effected more good than it would have done had it been more complete. It still remained a domestic implement of small cost, and its use rapidly extended. The jenny was imperfect in so far that it could only be brought to act upon rovings, which required to be formed on the hand-wheel already described. This defect was soon remedied by the introduction of the stabbing billy, in which the parts of the jenny were reversed, the place of the clove or clasp being supplied by rollers, and the spindles being mounted in a frame running on a railroad. The card rolls or slivers were in this machine placed continuously on an inclined plane, formed by a travelling canvass, which conducted them up to the feeding-rollers, placed at its highest point; and on passing through the feeding-rollers the slivers were attached to the spindles, which, receding from the rollers, twisted the slivers and formed rovings for the jenny. This machine is still used for forming the rove in wool-spinning.
The problem of automatic spinning, however, remained yet to be practically solved, and this solution was reserved for the genius of another man in poor circumstances—Richard Arkwright.
The bad success of roller-spinning in the hands of Wyatt, an ingenious man, and of those other speculators who purchased either machines or licenses from Paul, would have deterred most men from again attempting it; but partial failure appears to have ever stimulated the persevering Arkwright to fresh exertion. He, a poor man, a barber by trade, unaided, almost uneducated, and totally unacquainted with mechanics, perfected a system of machine-spinning which ultimately raised the manufactures of his country to a height unexampled, and obtained for him honour and wealth.
Arkwright's principle of roller-spinning need not here be particularly described, as we shall have occasion to illustrate it more fully afterwards. It is only necessary generally to observe, that in this mode of spinning the material is extended to the requisite degree by rollers, and twisted and wound up by a flyer and bobbin, as in the small flax-wheel, the drawing, the twisting, and the winding up being simultaneously carried on. Important as the invention of roller-spinning is, it is not on it alone that the fame of Arkwright rests, but also on the power of mind displayed in remodelling the habits of people accustomed to desultory working, and, in short, in establishing the factory system.
The next great invention was also produced by a man in humble circumstances—Samuel Crompton, a weaver at Hall-in-the-Wood, near Bolton. This ingenious individual, combining the drawing roller of Arkwright with the jenny of Hargreaves, produced a beautiful, though somewhat complex machine, to which he gave the appropriate name of the mule-jenny. In the mule-jenny the drawing rollers are mounted in a stationary frame, and the twisting spindles in a moveable carriage; the rovings are passed through the rollers and attached to the spindles; the rollers and spindles are then made to revolve, and the carriage to recede from the rollers, carrying away and twisting the attenuated rove. When a sufficient quantity of rove has been given out, the motion of the rollers is suddenly stopped, and that of the spindles of the carriage increased to nearly double its former velocity, the carriage itself still receding from the rollers, but at about one-half its former speed; thus the greatest extension only takes place as the rove receives twist to enable it to bear it.
These machines were all the offspring of the cotton manufacture; but it may be well supposed that the principle on which they act would soon be adopted in the spinning of wool, flax, and silk. It is not here necessary to trace the different steps through which, by slow degrees, the parts of these machines were brought to suit the peculiarities of other manufactures. We shall, therefore, proceed to the elucidation of the principles of spinning the various textile materials by machinery, observing first, that, to fit these materials for spinning, they are made to undergo several preparatory processes; the effect of which, when well performed, is to separate the fibres, to unravel those which are entangled, and, except in the case of flax, to present the whole mass in a continuous sliver or ribbon of an equal width and density throughout its whole extent. On this sliver the operation of spinning is performed.
If we take hold of a portion of such a sliver with the hands rather farther apart from each other than the average length of the fibres of which it is composed, we shall find that, by the sliding of the fibres on each other, we can extend it a little without breaking it. Suppose, then, that we thus extend a few successive portions, and lay them together, and combine them by slightly twisting them, so that the torsion shall generate a certain compression among the co-fibres, we shall now find that we are able to extend the mass considerably farther without breaking, and so by continued drawing and twisting we may attenuate the sliver until it become a fine thread. There are two circumstances which limit its extensibility. The first is that state of it when many of the fibres which compose it end together at the same place, and which is one of the objects of carding, and the purpose of some of the after-processes, to prevent. The second is when the friction produced by the twisting becomes so great that the fibres will sooner break than slide on each other.
The operations, then, to be performed by the spinning machinery are—to extend the mass of sliver as it comes from the preparatory machines, by repeated operations, or drawings, as they are termed, into a narrower and narrower ribbon; to twist this ribbon into a loose thread or
Spinning-rove, to enable it to bear greater extension; and further, to extend this rove to the last degree of attenuation required, twisting it, at the same time, so hard, that, when the operation is finished, and the thread perfectly formed, the fibres will sooner break through than separate, by sliding on each other. All these operations are, however, more or less mixed up with each other in practice. Thus, the carding-engines, besides disentangling the fibres, draw the broad sheet of loose filaments into a narrower and more compact sliver; the drawing-frames extend this into a still narrower ribbon; in the roving-frames the drawing still proceeds, and by an additional apparatus the sliver is twisted; and this drawing and twisting are carried on together in the spinning-frame and in the mule-jenny until the completion of the thread.
The manner in which the drawing is effected may be conveniently represented by a figure. Let aa in the figure represent a pair of rollers, which are called retaining-rollers; let these revolve in the direction of the arrows with a given velocity, and receive between them the sliver bd; they will thus impart to it the rate of motion of their own surfaces; let cc be another pair of rollers, which are called drawing-rollers, revolving with twice the speed of aa, and receiving between them the sliver. Imparting to it now their own motion, they will cause it to move forward twice as fast as it is yielded by aa, which it can only do by the fibres sliding asunder. If, therefore, a given length of sliver be passed through the roller, it will be drawn out to twice its original length, and its sectional area will be but half of what it was. The drawing-rollers have here been supposed to move twice as fast as the retaining-rollers; but their relative speed may be in other proportions. Thus the drawing-rollers may move three, four, or five times faster than the other pair, and extend the sliver to three, four, or five times its original length. This difference of speed is termed the draught of the machine, and a machine is said to have a draught of two, three, four, five, or six, as the speed of the surface of the drawing-rollers is so many times greater than that of the retaining-rollers. It is obvious that, to effect the lengthening of the sliver, the distance between the drawing and retaining-rollers must be somewhat greater than the average length of the fibres which compose the sliver. For were the distance less than this, the consequence would be disruption of the fibres themselves, from both rollers having hold of the opposite ends of the same fibres at the same time. But the distance may be too great, which would tend to make the fibres separate entirely at the middle point between the rollers, or at least to make the greatest attenuation take place there.
It is obvious, too, that the amount of extension which a single sliver can endure must be small, from the danger of the ends of many fibres occurring at the same place. Hence there exists a necessity for laying many slivers of the first drawing together for the second drawing, and many of these again for the third drawing. This laying together of the drawings, which is termed doubling, possesses the advantage of ensuring greater equality in the thread, from the inequalities of the separate drawings counteracting each other. The oftener this doubling is repeated, the more compact and equal, or level, the thread will be, and the more capable of enduring attenuation from the interspersion of the endings of the fibres.
As an example, in figures, of the effect of the drawing and doubling processes, suppose the velocity of the drawing-rollers to that of the retaining-rollers, or, in other words, the draught of the machine to be as 5 to 1, let the length of the sliver, before drawing, be 1, and its density 1; after the drawing we shall have the length increased to 5, and
the density diminished to .2. Suppose a doubling consisting of 8 of those new drawings to be put through the rollers, we shall have a new sliver formed, length 25, density .32; and the result of the doubling being repeated four times, the ratios being the same, that is in figures,
, will be a length of 625, and a density 6.5; that is to say, there will be 6.5 times as many fibres in the same space as there were originally, and the length will be increased to 625, this length of 625 being made up of 4096 separate slivers, or ends, as they are termed.
Such is the process of drawing without twist, in its simplest form, and as it is applied to cotton, wool, and silk waste. In flax-spinning the nature of the material renders a more complicated apparatus necessary. Each fibre of flax, on minute examination, will be found to be made up of a number of smaller parallel filaments bound together. The separation of these bundled filaments is partially effected by the hackling process; but it is evident, that the thread is not capable of its greatest degree of attenuation until the total separation of the filaments be completed. For this reason, a hackle, which shall separate the filaments, is an essential part of the drawing apparatus for flax; and, in the repeated doublings of the slivers, a succession of machines is used, in which the hackles are gradually finer.
From the length of the fibres of the flax, the rollers require to be at a considerable distance from each other, and the hackles are placed in the interval between them. They are fixed to an endless chain, working over rollers, and their points are made to move through the sliver, with a speed a little greater than that of the retaining-rollers. They thus have a double action. Entering the sliver immediately on its emission from the retaining-rollers, and moving faster than it does, they split down the bundles of the fibres, and allow the sliver to be extended by the rollers. As they proceed onwards, the action of the drawing-rollers makes the extending sliver move many times faster than the hackles, and, by this means, straightens and lays parallel those fibres which may happen to be doubled, or to lie obliquely in the sliver. This ingenious apparatus is called the Gill, from the name of its inventor.
The process which succeeds these repeated drawings, whether made by the simple rollers or by the gill, is twisting the sliver into a rove. For this purpose, an addition of a bobbin and flyer is made to the drawing machine. The bobbin is made to revolve with such speed as to wind up the rove as fast as it is yielded by the last pair of rollers, and the flyer with so much additional speed as to give to the sliver the desired twist while moving between the roller and the bobbin. As the diameter of the bobbin is continually increasing by the accumulation of the rove, and as the speed of the rollers remains constant, it is necessary to vary the speed of the bobbin, so that, as it increases in diameter, it may diminish in speed, and wind up the rove at the same rate throughout. The mechanism for effecting this is, in some machines, very complicated.
The next operation is forming the thread from the rove. For this there are two kinds of machines used—one, the throstle, which is a simplification of Arkwright's spinning-frame, and consists of a set of drawing-rollers, with bobbins and flyers, as in the roving frame; the other is that combination of the drawing-rollers with the jenny which is termed the mule. In the roving and throstle frames the twisting apparatus is stationary, and merely twists, and the twisting succeeds the drawing. In the mule the twisting apparatus recedes from the rollers faster than they yield the sliver, and consequently has a drawing as well as a twisting power. In the throstle, the rove being pulled by
the bobbin through the flyer, is, while yet tender, subjected to a continual strain. In the mule the rove is only subjected to strain, as it receives twist enough to enable it to bear the strain without injury. The mule, too, by the peculiarity of its mode of action, destroys those inequalities of the rove which result from defects in the drawing, or injury sustained in the roving. To understand how it does so, it is necessary to observe, that, when a thread of unequal thickness is twisted, the fibres which compose the thick parts, forming larger and more oblique spirals than those which compose the small parts of the thread, require a greater force to twist them, and consequently remain soft, while the small parts become comparatively hard twisted. If a considerable length of such a thread were pulled, the fibres of the thick parts would slide upon each other; while those of the smaller parts, being mutually compressed, by their greater degree of torsion, would resist the drawing asunder. The drawing would thus take place only in the thick parts; and as they diminished in size, the twist would gradually become equally diffused. The mule, acting in this manner, with a drawing and twisting power, upon a considerable length of unequally sized, and consequently unequally twisted rove, reduces its inequalities, and renders it level and uniformly twisted throughout.
Arkwright's first machine was called the water-twist frame, from having originally been driven by water-power. It consisted of a pair of retaining-rollers and a pair of drawing-rollers, such as those we have used for the sake of illustration, which effected the extension of the sliver. From the drawing-rollers the sliver passed to another pair of rollers, called the delivering-rollers, which, moving with the same velocity as the drawing-rollers, had no extending power, but merely compressed the sliver and delivered it to the twisting apparatus. This consisted of the bobbin and flyer of the Saxon or flax wheel, improved in respect of the flyer being rendered automatic in spreading the thread on the bobbin; and this automatic action was shortly afterwards, with good effect, transferred from Arkwright's machine to the hand-wheel by a Mr Antis. Each system of rollers and twisting apparatus in Arkwright's machine was separate, and was driven by a separate system of gearing, and pulleys and bands, rendering the machine, when of great extent, exceedingly complicated. One of the greatest improvements of modern days is the simplification of the moving parts, by making each roller continuous along the whole length of the machine, and using only one set of driving apparatus at the one or other extremity, and by making the shaft for driving the twisting machinery also continuous.
We have seen that the parts of the machine which perform the operations of drawing and twisting, viz., the rollers, and the bobbin and flyer apparatus, are very simple. The complexity arises, therefore, from the number of parts required to communicate motion to these parts, and to regulate their movements; and the arbitrary nature of the form and arrangements of the parts for communicating motion, causes the great differences which exist in the various spinning machines. In a brief sketch like the present, it is obviously impossible to notice the many beautiful arrangements which, from time to time, have been introduced; and we must refer the reader to the articles COTTON, FLAX, ROPEMAKING, SILK, WOOL, &c., for detailed information as to the peculiar modifications in spinning machinery, rendered necessary by the quality of the article operated upon. (J. N.)