Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/306

292 jenny, and by which eight yarns or threads could be as easily spun as one. It was eventually perfected to such a degree that a child could keep eighty or one hundred spindles in motion. This machine was used to a limited extent in the wool manufacture, before it was superseded by the throstle of Arkwright and the mule of Crompton.

It is the common understanding that the woolen manufacture owes its development to the application of mechanical ideas first applied to the manipulation of. cotton. The two industries have,



indeed, marched forward shoulder to shoulder. They are allies, both in use and in methods of manipulation. Nearly every new idea in the mechanism of one has been turned to good account in the other. Cards for the combing of cotton were first adapted from the woolen manufacture, while on the other hand the woolen manufacture owes a vast debt to men whose discoveries were first applied to cotton. This debt is reciprocal, and it is hard to strike a balance of obligation. It was not until after Arkwright had utilized and developed Paul's machine for "spinning without fingers" that the wool manufacture began to get the full benefit of it. Arkwright's first patent was dated July 3, 1709; it covered the use of successive pairs of rollers drawing the sliver of cotton from one pair of rollers on to another pair running at greater speed, twisting the thread in the mean time by means of wooden fliers, with wire arms for correctly guiding the thread upon the