spinning wheel

Spinning Wheel

A spinning wheel is a device for spinning thread or yarn from natural or man-made fibers, where spinning is the process of twisting fibers together to create yarn.

The first improvement in spinning technology was the spinning wheel, which was invented in India between 500 and 1000 A.D. It reached Europe via the Middle East in the European Middle Ages. It replaced the earlier method of hand spinning with a spindle. The first stage in mechanizing the process was to mount the spindle horizontally in bearings so that it could be rotated by a cord encircling a large, hand-driven wheel. The great wheel is an example of this type of wheel, where the fiber is held in the left hand and the wheel slowly turned with the right. Holding the fiber at an angle to the spindle produced the necessary twist.

A series of improvements occurred in the 1700s and culminated in the first rotor or open end spinning mill in the United States in 1970. Until the acceptance of rotor spinning wheel, all yarns were produced by aligning fibers through drawing techniques and then twisting the fiber together. With rotor spinning, the fibers in the roving are separated, thus open end, and then wrapped and twisted as the yarn is drawn out of the rotor cup. Newer technologies that may offer even faster yarn production include friction spinning, an open-end system, an air jet, spinning a drafting system.

The changes in modern spinning have had for their object; the providing of mechanical means to rotate the spindle, an automatic method of drawing out the fibers, and devices for working a large group of spindles together, at speeds before unattainable