Roller Spinning

Roller spinning is a method of mechanically drawing out, or attenuating, carded fiber into finer, longer yarn by passing it through two or more pairs of rollers turning at successively faster speeds, so that each pair stretches the fiber thinner than the pair before it, before a bobbin-and-flyer mechanism adds the twist that holds the finished yarn together. The English inventor Lewis Paul, working with the machinist John Wyatt, patented the roller drafting principle in 1738, decades before it became commercially practical, seeking a mechanical substitute for the drawing-out motion a hand spinner's fingers perform. Roller drafting was not successfully combined with continuous factory production until Richard Arkwright incorporated Paul's roller system into his own water frame in the 1760s, spacing the rollers slightly farther apart than the fiber's own staple length so the fiber would not break as it was drawn out; that same graduated-roller drafting principle, refined but fundamentally unchanged, underlies essentially every mechanical spinning frame built since, including the throstle frame and the ring spinning frame.