Invention of the Spinning Jenny.

About 1760 the Manchester Merchants began also to export Fustians in considerable quantities to Italy, Germany, and the North American Colonies, and the cotton manufacture continued to increase until the spinners were unable to supply the weavers with weft. Those weavers whose families could not furnish the necessary supply of weft, had their spinning done by their neighbours, and were obliged to pay more for the spinning than the price allowed by their masters; and even with this disadvantage, very few could procure weft enough to keep themselves constantly employed. It was no uncommon thing for a weaver to walk three or four miles in a morning, and call on five or six spinners, before he could collect weft to serve him for the remainder of the day; and when he wished to weave a piece in a shorter time than usual, a new ribbon, or gown, was necessary to quicken the exertions of the spinner. It is evident that an important crisis for the Cotton Manufacture of Lancashire was now arrived. It must either receive an extraordinary impulse, or, like most other human affairs, after enjoying a partial prosperity, retrograde. The spinners could not supply weft enough for the weavers. The first The first consequence of this would be to raise the price of spinning. In the then state of manners and prejudices, when the facilities of communication between places were less, and the population generally possessed with much greater antipathy to leaving their native place than at present, this inducement would have failed to bring together a sufficient number of hand spinners, and a farther rise in the price of spinning must have been the consequence. This would have rendered the price of the manufactured cloth too great to have been purchased for home or foreign consumption, for which its cheapness must of course have been the principal inducement.

In this strait a means of obviating the difficulty was found in a quarter where it could have been least expected. A reed maker, of the name of Thomas Highs, residing in the town of Leigh, in Lancashire, one forenoon in the year 1763 or 4,

爨

being in the house of one of his neighbours, whose son, a weaver, had come home after a long, ineffectual search for weft, was, by the circumstance, roused to consider whether a machine could not be invented to produce a more plentiful supply of weft. He engaged one Kay, a clock maker, to make him the wheels and other apparatus of his machine, and they worked together in a garret in Highs' house. The chamber door was kept locked, and they worked at over hours with great assiduity and perseverance for several months. All their trouble and pains were, however, abortive, and one Sunday evening, in a fit of despondency, they threw the machine through the garret window, into the yard.-During their labours they were often jeered by their neighbours with enquiries for weft, and after the catastrophe of the garret window, the derision broke out without restraint. Kay was asked what wages his master gave him for making spinning wheels, to which he replied, that he had done with spinning; and then joined in the laugh with his neighbours. Highs was not so easily discouraged; his persevering mind, though foiled, was not subdued. He took the broken wheels once more to his garret, and after another effort produced the ingenious machine known by the name of the Spinning Jenny, and which he so called after his daughter, her christian name being Jane. The first Jenny was about a yard square, and worked only six spindles, which he afterwards increased to twenty and twenty-five.

In spinning with the hand wheel, the roving was taken fast hold of betwixt the left fore finger and thumb, at six inches distance from the spindle; the wheel, which by a band gave motion to the spindle, was then turned with the right hand, and at the same time the left hand, holding the roving fast as before-mentioned, was drawn back about half a yard; the roving was thus drawn out into weft, the necessary twist was then given by a few turns of the wheel, and finally the weft was wound upon the spindle. See plate 3. fig. 3. Highs' Jenny performed these operations in the following manner:-The spindles were placed in front, and a string from each spindle went round a wooden drum or cylinder, which turned on a perpendicular axis. The drum was turned by an horizontal handle. The rovings were fixed on skewers at the back of the Jenny, each roving passing through a separate loop of wire placed about eighteen inches higher than the spindles and skewers, and half way betwixt them. At each of the front corners of the Jenny stood an upright post, three feet higher than the spindles; these posts were grooved perpendicularly on the inside from their tops to the level of the spindle. Two flat pieces of wood, made to open and shut something like a parallel ruler, but opening and shutting vertically, and not laterally, went across the front, their ends

fitted into the two grooves, and they were worked perpendicularly from the spindles to the tops of the posts, by a cord which coiled round a moveable bobbin fixed upon the axle of the drum. When the bobbin was on the lower part of the axle, it turned with it, but when lifted nearer the handle, the axle turned and the bobbin remained stationary. When the pieces of wood, called the clove, were raised to the proper height, the bobbin was lifted by a latch, and the clove remained suspended until lowered by the hand of the spinner. From the wire loops the rovings passed between the flat rulers, or clove, to the spindles. After shutting the clove, or in other words, fastening the roving between the two edges of the rulers, he turned the drum, which set the spindles in motion and raised the clove, drawing out the portion of roving between the clove and the spindles. When drawn out, he lifted the bobbin, the clove thus remained stationary while he gave the weft the proper degree of twist by a few turns of the drum. The clove was then lowered, which wound the weft upon the spindles. See plate 6. Some improvements were afterwards made in the structure of the Jenny, by James Hargrave, of Blackburn. These improvements consisted in placing the spindles at the back, and the rovings and the clove at the front. In the improved Jenny the clove moves horizontally from the spindles when drawing out the rovings, and towards them when copping the weft. See plate 7.

The Encyclopædias state that the merit of the invention of the Jenny is due to Hargrave; but he was not the original inventor, for even if he did make a Jenny in 1767, as stated by them, Highs had made Jennies two or three years before: this, however, is evidently a mistake. The fact of Highs having completed the Jenny in 1764, is proved by the statement of Thomas Leather, see Appendix Nos. 1 and 2, where he states that his father, Richard Leather, a wheelwright, took a public house, the Seven Stars, in the Walk, in Leigh, and went to live at it in May, 1763. On the death of his wife he declined selling ale, and he left the house in May, 1766. During the three years that Leather lived in this house, Highs and Kay were his next, and next but one door neighbours, and in the first or second of those years, Highs invented the Jenny.

"The case of Mr. Richard Arkwright and Co." published in 1781, contains a short account of different inventions for the spinning of Cotton, and says:-"About "the year 1767 one Hargrave, of Blackburn, constructed an engine that would at "once spin twenty or thirty threads into yarn for the fustian manufacture." This account has been copied by Dr. Aikin, in his History of Manchester, by the editors of the Encyclopædias, and by other writers. The word "con

structed" used in Mr. Arkwright's pamphlet, has been changed into "invented," and the merit of the invention erroneously attributed to Hargrave. It was convenient for Mr. Arkwright, and served his purpose, to attribute the invention of the Jenny to Hargrave, because Hargrave was not the inventor of the Water Frame, the talisman of Arkwright's fortune, and which, by his case or memorial, he was then seeking to engross to himself; to have mentioned Highs, the real inventor of the Jenny, might have been a dangerous experiment, because, as Mr. Arkwright well knew, Highs was the inventor of the Water Frame as well as the Jenny.

E

Invention of the Water Frame, or Throstle.

The Jenny was only applicable to the spinning of the Weft or transverse threads, but having been successful in his first effort, Highs was induced to prosecute his inventions, and endeavour to complete a machine which should spin Cotton to that degree of hardness and fineness required in the yarn for the warp, or longitudinal threads, which hitherto had been made from foreign linen yarn. In this attempt, after much labour and meditation, he was equally successful as in the former instance. He produced a second original machine, unlike to, and uncompounded of, the former one, which equalled its precursor in its great effects, and surpassed it in ingenuity. In this new attempt he placed the rovings on skewers at the back of the machine; from the skewers the rovings passed between two rollers, placed horizontally, the one above the other; the lower roller was furrowed or fluted lengthwise, and the upper one was covered with leather. These rollers, each about an inch in diameter, revolved in close contact, drawing the rovings slowly from the skewers. A similar pair of rollers, but revolving five times whilst the first pair revolved once, were placed nearer the front. The second pair, by turning quicker, pulled at the roving much faster than it was given out by the first pair, and as both pairs pressed it fast between the sharp fluted edges and the leather, this pulling of the second pair drew it out and lengthened it.* The first pair drew the roving from the skewer as the

*Dr. Aikin in his History of Manchester, 4to. Loudon, 1795, page 172, describes this machine in the following manner:-"The cotton to be spun is introduced through three sets of rollers, so governed "by the clock work, that the set which first receives the cotton makes so many more revolutions than the "next in order, and these more than the last which feed the spindles, that it is drawn out considerably "in passing through the rollers." The effect of the machine, as described by Aikin, if it could act at all, would be to reduce the roving to its original state.