Throstle Frame

A throstle frame is an early continuous spinning machine that draws, twists and winds cotton or wool fiber into yarn in one uninterrupted motion, powered continuously rather than working in the alternating draw-and-wind cycle of a spinning mule. It descends from Richard Arkwright's water frame and takes its common name from the throstle, a dialect word for the song thrush, because the machine's constant running motion produced a steady humming or singing sound in the mill rather than the mule's intermittent clatter. Because it ran continuously rather than pausing to wind each finished length of yarn, the throstle frame could be tended with less operator skill than a mule and was well suited to spinning the stronger, coarser warp yarn a power loom needed, and it remained a common fixture of nineteenth-century cotton and woolen mills until it was gradually superseded by the ring spinning frame, which applied the same continuous principle with a lighter, faster ring-and-traveler mechanism in place of the throstle's flyer.