Water Frame

The water frame is a cotton-spinning machine powered by a waterwheel rather than by hand, able to spin 96 threads at once and to produce yarn stronger and harder than that of the manually cranked spinning jenny. Richard Arkwright patented the water frame in 1769, having first put a working model to use in 1765, building on a spinning machine the clockmaker John Kay had earlier constructed for the inventor Thomas Highs before Arkwright hired Kay himself. In 1771 Arkwright installed the water frame at his Cromford mill in Derbyshire, creating one of the first factories purpose-built to house machinery rather than simply to gather workers together, and paired with his own carding machine it became the first factory to run a continuous process from raw cotton to finished thread, helping establish the modern factory system that drove the Industrial Revolution forward.