James Hargreaves

English inventor

• Born: January 8, 1720 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Possibly Stanhill, near Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, England
• Died: April 22, 1778
• Place of death: Nottinghamshire, England

Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, which greatly multiplied the output of spinners and initiated a period of rapid growth in the textile industry that marked the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

Early Life

Very little of the early life of James Hargreaves is known, except for his date of baptism and the possible place of birth. It also appears that he was employed from 1740 to 1750 as a carpenter and handloom weaver at Standhill, a town near Blackburn. The first certain record of Hargreaves’s life—besides baptismal records—is his employment in 1760 by Robert Peel, an experienced spinner and calico printer in Blackburn and the grandfather of statesman Sir Robert Peel. Peel wished to have an improved machine for carding, the process of disentangling fibers prior to spinning.

In about 1760, the English weaving industry, centered in Lancashire, faced a crisis because spinners could not produce enough thread to satisfy weavers’ needs and permit their businesses to operate profitably. This imbalance had been caused by the introduction in the 1730’s of John Kay’s flying shuttle, which greatly facilitated weaving. Adding to the crisis was that fabrics could not be made from cotton alone because of the lack of sufficiently strong cotton fibers. One indication of the industry’s determination to overcome these problems is that the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce offered handsome premiums to inventors of improved spinning machinery, but it only received several unsuccessful designs. The invention that would prove revolutionary was not among them, for it belonged to an illiterate and humble cottage weaver, James Hargreaves, who invented his machine, the spinning jenny, in 1764.

Life’s Work

The spinning jenny was James Hargreaves’s one significant contribution, but it proved a major one. Historian Sir Edward Baines has written that it showed “high mechanical genius”: For the first time, it permitted weavers to spin, simultaneously and in one operation, several threads of such materials as wool, cotton, and flax.

The spinning jenny was a sophisticated engineering feat, and it required great physical skill of the operator. It consisted of two creels, or racks, of bobbins set in a wooden frame. One rack held roving, the drawn-out and slightly twisted pieces of the raw material to be spun. The bobbins in the other rack received the yarn that had been drawn out by a carriage with one hand and spun with the other. The spinning was controlled by a wheel attached to a gear-and-pulley system. Returning the carriage to its original position after drawing out and spinning the roving caused the second set of bobbins to rotate and draw in the yarn.

It is popularly held that the spinning jenny was conceived as a result of happenstance. Coming into the kitchen, the story goes, Hargreaves startled his wife and caused her to knock over her single-thread spinning wheel. The wheel and the spindle continued to spin as the machine lay horizontal on the floor, and this is supposed to have suggested to Hargreaves the idea of building a horizontal spinning wheel that would be able to spin eight threads at a time. In effect, the machine provided the spinner with the equivalent of extra hands.

The new invention gave a great advantage to Hargreaves and his family over other cottage weavers. They used the spinning jenny to make weft—a coarse, weak yarn that they worked on their own loom in combination with stronger warp yarn. The Hargreaves’s machine originally handled eleven threads of yarn at once. Evidently they used it in secrecy, fearing that other spinners in the region, which was the center of the English fabric and weaving industries, would become envious. When Hargreaves became financially pinched, however, he decided to make extra jennies and sell them to other spinners. This led to the sacking of his home in 1768 by a mob fearful that the machine would put many spinners out of work. The mob reportedly scoured the Blackburn area to locate and destroy other jennies as well as other recent inventions, such as carding engines and water-frames, that they believed would decrease the industry’s dependence on human labor. The mob spared, however, jennies of twenty spindles or less, considering only those of greater capacity to be “mischievous.”

His family factory destroyed, Hargreaves moved south to Nottingham, which was not a center of textile manufacture, and opened a small cotton mill in association with Thomas James, a joiner who appears to have helped Hargreaves to apply for a patent, which was taken out in July, 1770. The patent was for a jenny capable of spinning sixteen threads at once.

The origin of the name of the spinning jenny is disputed. Some historians claim that the name commemorates Hargreaves’s wife, but her name is nowhere recorded. An almost contemporary commentator, Richard Guest, claimed that the machine was named for the daughter, named Jane, of a spinner from Leigh, Lancashire, Thomas Highs. Also disputed is whether Hargreaves actually invented the spinning jenny or merely improved an existing machine. Guest argued that Highs invented the spinning jenny in 1764 and that Hargreaves had merely improved the design. The most compelling arguments, however, are made by Baines. He states that Hargreaves’s machine differed greatly from the machines of others who laid claim to the invention, and he argues that it must have predated the machines of other claimants. Baines also argues that the spinning jenny was so brilliantly conceived and executed that it undoubtedly took several years to conceive; since it was perfected by 1768, he says, Hargreaves must have been inventing prototypes several years earlier, and before other competitors’ machines were developed.

After Hargreaves took out a patent on his invention, he discovered, nevertheless, that it was being used by many manufacturers in Lancashire. A legal dispute ensued, and those breaching Hargreaves’s copyright offered him œ3,000. Hargreaves at first demanded œ7,000, though he later reduced his claim to œ4,000. In any case, he refused to settle the case. His claims foundered, however, when the court learned that the inventor, forced to find funds to feed his six or seven children, had sold several jennies to manufacturers before taking out the patent.

Opinion varies as to Hargreaves’s subsequent fate. The most dependable source, Baines, basing his account on an inquiry by the son of Hargreaves’s partner, James, says that the partnership continued after the unsuccessful lawsuit “with moderate success,” and that Hargreaves lived modestly on its profits. When he died in April, 1778, he left his wife œ400.

Hargreaves’s only other contribution to the rapidly evolving technology of fabric manufacture was the cylinder carder, a device soon superseded by better machines.

Significance

After James Hargreaves’s death, spinning jennies such as he had invented were soon being used throughout England. That machine, together with the water-frame developed by Sir Richard Arkwright, permitted pure cotton cloth to be made for the first time and promoted a rapid advance in cotton manufacture. Spinning jennies soon permitted spinners to work as many as 120 threads onto spindles at once, and the product was of a highly improved quality. As a result, spinners were able to increase their wages greatly. The invention also sparked a period of intense interest in aiding the manufacture of fabrics through machinery. Many weavers opposed these developments, but the new machinery actually increased the number of people employed in the fabrics industries.

Hargreaves’s invention was one of a few which sparked the beginning of the factory system in England. Before its development, the manufacture of thread had been a cottage industry. A small spinning jenny could be used in the weaver’s home, and a larger one could be placed in an adjoining workshop, but some of the other inventions that were sparked by its appearance could only be placed in larger, sturdier mills. The invention also encouraged greater division of labor, which again hastened the advent of the factory system. The factory system quickly became essential, as no cottage industry could compete with the efficiency and bulk output of the factories.

Bibliography

Baines, Sir Edward. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain. London: Frank Cass, 1966. A reprint of a work that originally appeared in 1835. A standard history of the cotton industry and the best source for Hargreaves’s history. Compares his contribution to the advent of the Industrial Revolution to that of Sir Richard Arkwright and others.

Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures: Industry, Innovation, and Work in Britain, 1700-1820. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 1994. An excellent survey of eighteenth century British industry, featuring two chapters on the textile industry, with information on Hargreaves.

Guest, Richard. A Compendious History of the Cotton-Manufacture. Manchester, England: Joseph Pratt, 1823. Argues that Thomas Highs was the inventor of the spinning jenny as well as Arkwright’s water-frame. Presents a history of the Lancashire cotton industry consonant with that argument, including testimony from Highs’s unsuccessful lawsuit against Arkwright. In some respects more a curiosity than a dependable source. Contains illustrations of machinery.

Lipson, E. The History of the Woollen and Worsted Industries. London: A. and C. Black, 1921. Contains only a brief description of Hargreaves’s contribution to the history of the industry but provides a useful description of the context of his invention.

Smelser, Neil J. Social Change in the Industrial Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. An application of a model of social change, the general theory of action, to the British cotton industry in Hargreaves’s time.

Wadsworth, Alfred P., and Julia De Lacy Mann. The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600-1780. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1931. A standard text on the history of the industry in the years leading up to the Industrial Revolution. Describes the advent of the inventions of Hargreaves and others and the effect they had on the society and economy of the region.