In 1764, James Hargreaves, a weaver in Stanhill, Lancashire, built a spinning machine which used eight spindles onto which the thread was spun from a corresponding set of eight rovings, all turned by a single wheel. It became known as the "Spinning Jenny". He did not patent the machine (a 16-spindle machine) until July 1770, by which times many copies of his machine were in use (the courts rejected his patent application for his original Spinning Jenny because he had sold several machines too long before he filed for the patent).
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Hargreaves was born at Oswaldtwistle, near Blackburn, in about 1720 and received no formal education, being unable to either read or write. He worked as a carpenter and weaver, working under the "putting-out" system - working on a cottage loom for a large concern which provided the raw cotton and collected and paid for the finished cloth.
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It is said that Hargreaves' daughter, Jenny, accidentally knocked over the family's spinning wheel and the spindle continued to revolve making her father realise that multiple spindles, each spinning a thread, could be worked by one wheel. Jenny was the name of his wife, however, after whom the machine was named.
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The thread produced by the Spinning Jenny was coarse and lacked strength, making it suitable only for the filling of weft (threads woven across the warp).
Hargreaves originally made the machine for use by the family but soon realised that he could profit from the sale of the machines. In 1768, fearing cheaper competition, spinners from Lancashire marched on Hargreaves house in Stanhill and destroyed his machines.
The original machine spinning eight threads was developed into one which could spin up to 120 simultaneously and it is estimated that by 1778, the year of Hargreaves' death, over twenty thousand of the machines were in use in Britain.
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