How it began
James Hargreaves was a poor, uneducated spinner and weaver living at Stanhill, near Blackburn in Lancashire. About 1764 he is said to have conceived the idea when he saw a spinning wheel that his young daughter Jenny had accidentally overturned. The spindle kept revolving upright instead of horizontally, and he reasoned that many spindles could be turned that way. He built a machine with which one person could spin several threads at one time, and he received a patent for it on July 12, 1770.
Before it existed
Yarn was spun on the spinning wheel, which produced one thread at a time. Britannica describes the jenny as a development of the spinning wheel into a multiple-spindle machine for spinning wool or cotton. One account says that Hargreaves's machine may have been an improvement on one by Thomas High that collected thread on six spindles.
Who pushed back
After Hargreaves began selling the machines to help support his large family, hand spinners who feared unemployment broke into his house and destroyed a number of jennies. He moved to Nottingham in 1768. There, with a partner named Thomas James, he built a small mill in which jennies spun yarn for hosiers. The mill proved moderately successful and he worked there until his death in 1778.
What lasted
Britannica calls the jenny the first practical application of multiple spinning by a machine and a significant factor in the industrialization of the textile industry. Its yarn was inferior to that made on Richard Arkwright's water frame. The machine remains a standard example of the shift from hand to machine production in the Industrial Revolution.
