James Hargreaves

James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, the machine that broke the bottleneck in textile production and began the mechanisation of the Industrial Revolution. Born near Blackburn in Lancashire around 1720, he was a weaver and carpenter who could neither read nor write, and worked in the domestic system in which families spun and wove at home. The problem he solved was one of proportion. John Kay's flying shuttle of 1733 had roughly doubled a weaver's speed, and since it took several spinners to keep one weaver supplied, yarn became chronically scarce and weavers stood idle. Around 1764 he built a frame carrying eight spindles turned by a single wheel, so that one worker could spin eight threads at once. The traditional story is that he saw an overturned spinning wheel still revolving and realised the spindle would work vertically. Later versions carried sixteen and then up to eighty spindles. The yarn it produced was suitable for weft but too weak for warp, so it did not immediately displace the older methods; Richard Arkwright's water frame supplied the strong warp thread. Local spinners understood exactly what it meant for their livelihoods. A crowd broke into his house around 1768 and destroyed his machines, and he moved to Nottingham, where he set up a small mill with a partner. He patented the jenny in 1770, but had sold machines before applying, which weakened the claim, and the courts refused to enforce it. Manufacturers copied it freely, and by the time he died there were thousands in use. He never became wealthy from it, though he was not destitute, and he died in Nottingham in 1778.

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