Spinning yarn by hand · Ceded (since 1779)

Samuel Crompton completes the spinning mule at Hall i' th' Wood near Bolton, a machine built to imitate the motions of a hand spinner's fingers and to drive hundreds of spindles at once.

Hand spinning was cottage work, done on a wheel or a distaff by women and children, and it took several spinners to keep a single weaver supplied. The mule joined Arkwright's rollers to Hargreaves' moving carriage and did the drawing and the twisting together, and Crompton never patented it, so it spread without check until four to five million mule spindles were running by 1812. Richard Roberts made the mule self-acting in the 1820s, which took the spinner's hand off the carriage as well. Hand spinning survives as a craft, for yarns no machine reproduces, and as a domestic and political practice in South Asia, but nobody is clothed by it at scale, and the human work in a mill is now blending the fibre, setting draft and twist, and judging evenness and strength.