Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/645

The Industrial Revolution 489 era with its opportunity for endless improvement had begun. Let us examine some of the ways in which this came about. 868. Improvements in Spinning and Weaving. If one walks through a department store he may see hundreds of yards of cot- ton goods, silks, woolens, and velvets of marvelous fineness and beauty neatly piled on the shelves. None of this material has been made by hand, but has been skillfully and rapidly manu- factured by machinery. The revolution in manufacture which has taken place in the last hundred and fifty years is excellently illustrated by the improvement in making woven fabrics. In order to produce cloth one must first spin (that is, twist) the wool, cotton, or flax into thread ; then by means of a loom the thread can be woven into a fabric. If we examine a handkerchief or a piece of our clothing carefully we can see how skillfully the many threads are interlaced. A simple way of spinning thread had been in use for thousands of years, but it was possible for a person to make only a single thread at a time. This method was so slow that the weavers could not get all the thread they needed. There was great demand, therefore, for a means of spinning which would supply thread as fast as the weavers could use it. By 1767 James Hargreaves, an English spinner, invented what was called a spinning jenny, which enabled a workman, by turning a wheel, to spin eight or ten threads at once and thus do the work of eight or ten spinners. 1 A year later a barber, Richard Arkwright, patented a device operated by water power for drawing out thread by means of rollers. Before the end of the eighteenth century improved machines spinning two hundred threads simul- taneously had been invented, and as they were driven by power and required only one or two watchers, the hand workers could not compete with them. Such inventions as these produced the modern factory system. 1 The hand spinner had bunches of wool, which had been combed into loose curls, on the end of a stick, or distaff. She pulled and twisted this with her fingers into a yarn, which she wound on the spindle. By whirling the spindle around she could help twist. The spinning wheel was invented to give a better twist to the spindle. It had become common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was still used by our great-grandmothers. By means of the spinning wheel it was possible in some cases for one person to make two threads, one in one hand and a second in the other.