Energy & Industry / Manufacturing & Construction

Spinning Wheel

A hand- or foot-turned wheel can raise thread output more than tenfold; it sped up yarn making in the Middle Ages and was later copied by the first spinning machines.

Historians disagree on where the wheel began: it is dated to India around 500-1000 AD, to the Middle East by about 1030 and to China by about 1090, and it reached Europe in the 13th century. A large wheel and a cord turn a small spindle, and the treadle-and-flyer wheel, in common use in Europe by the 16th century, freed both hands and wound the yarn on while spinning. In the 1760s James Hargreaves' spinning jenny, essentially an adaptation of the wheel that drove eight spindles at once, started the mechanisation of spinning.