Peter Cavallo, age 11, of Long Island City, New York, for his question:

What exactly is a spinning Jenny?

The first cloth was woven patiently by hand, using simple gadgets made of sticks and stones. Step try step, the weaving art advanced through maybe 10,000 years to the complex modern textile mill. One of the historic textile advances was an invention called the spinning Jenny.

Jenny was an English girl who lived in the middle of the 18th century. We do not know her interests in life or much about her. But we do know that her father was James Hargreaves and his big interest in life was the busy weaving industry of England's Midland and Northern counties. Some of the mills were fed by wool from sheep that grazed on the nearby misty hills and more wool shipped from larger ranches overseas. Some of the mills still wove threads from the blue eyed flax plant into durable linen.

Textile manufacture requires three basic processes. First, the raw threads must be carded, or stretched smooth. Then comes spinning, the patient job of twisting and reeling baskets of short fibers into miles of ropy thread. In the third process, reels or spindles of the smooth, stringy threads are woven over and under to form flat lengths of cloth. Modern synthetics are blown through air vents and spun onto spindles as they are made. A synthetic textile mill may skip the spinning process.

But in the mills of the 18th century, the spinning of shortish natural fibers into long smooth strands of twisted thread was a tedious and time consuming job. But the Industrial Revolution and the automation of machinery were gradually getting underway. The old fashioned hand loom had been improved, making the weaving process easier and faster. The faster weaving looms needed more spindles of thread to keep going.

Old style spinning required two hands and a foot and it made only one spindle of thread at a time. One hand gathered tufts of raw threads and guided a loose, long thread to a wheel. The foot pumped a pedal that turned the wheel that tightened and twisted the short fibers into a long, strong thread. Another hand wound the ropy thread onto a tapered spindle. Clearly, a faster spinning method was needed, and the invention was made by James Hargreaves. His neat, mechanical gadget spun not one, but sixteen spindles of thread in jig time. This was in the year 1764 and Papa Hargreaves named his invention for his darling daughter Jenny. The spinning Jenny replaced the tedious old spinning wheel and advanced the textile industry a mighty important step on its way.

The threads spun on the Jenny were not strong enough for some of the weaving looms. But this was the Industrial Revolution. People were beginning to trust themselves to solve their problems with better inventions. The spinning Jenny was improved. A few years after its invention the basic machine was remodeled to spin stranger threads. and later models of the Jenny were designed to twist and turn 80 spindles of superior weaving thread at a time.