12/23/2023 0 Comments Spinning wheel painted running sheep![]() ![]() But in the hurly-burly of apocalypse, a placid sea can be unnerving too. The events of the third day may seem more benign: the sea shall ‘stand even in his cours agayn … with-outen mare rysng or fallyng’. There will be a hideous roaring from the ‘mast wonderful fisshes of the se’, blood gushing out of trees, men emerging from caves and raving incoherently, and then all the stars of heaven will cascade to the ground. On the first day the sea will rise to the height of a mountain, then on the second day drain away to a trickle. Spinning wheels only caught on in places where people needed to produce a lot of cloth quickly for trade.H ow will we know when the world is ending? According to ‘The Pricke of Conscience’, an English poem c.1340, the apocalypse will proceed with a fortnight of terrifying signs. More about the NavajoĮven in the American south-west, where Navajo people became shepherds and wove their wool for sale, they kept on moving from place to place, and so they found hand spindles more convenient. Most early European settlers in the Americas also bought their cloth from traders, and soon so did Native Americans. Spinning wheels did not catch on in West Africa or southern Africa, where most cloth production was just for use by your own family, and fine cotton or silk cloth was imported from India or West Asia. What’s the warp and the weft? Spinning in West Africa and the Americas So for the warp, women kept on spinning with drop spindles, slowly. But these early spinning wheels could only make a light, fluffy yarn that was good for knitting, or for the weft they couldn’t make the strong string you needed for the warp. In Europe, manufacturers began to use the spinning wheel to spin wool. Spinning wheel in France, about 1375 AD (Royal 10 E IV f. Again, that might have been partly because knitting reached Europe about 1250 AD. You’d think the Reconquista, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years’ War would have slowed down scientific progress, but textile manufacturers really wanted this new spinning wheel. It reached North Africa and Islamic Spain by 1350, and northern Europe and Italy before 1400, during the Hundred Years’ War. The spinning wheel reached the Delhi Sultanate in India (which also had a major cotton industry) before 1300. Spinning wheels were too expensive for most households – big textile companies owned them, like spinning machines today. Soon professional spinners all over Europe and Asia were making more clothing more cheaply – with the spinning wheel. Thanks to the travelling traders of the Silk Road, it didn’t take long to spread the word about the new invention. Spinning wheel in Baghdad (al-Wasit, 1237 AD) The Silk Road and spinning wheels ![]() ![]() Probably they needed good quality steel to make the wheel spin smoothly and steadily. Nobody knows whether Chinese or Islamic scientists got there first (and it’s also possible that the first spinning wheels were invented in India, which also sold a lot of cotton cloth). Scientists went to work on the problem, using hand cranks that had been invented about 150 AD, and by 1237 AD (or maybe a little earlier) they had invented a machine that could spin four times as fast as a hand spindle – a spinning wheel. Women in medieval Islam Who invented the spinning wheel? The invention of knitting about 400 AD may have made this problem worse. You could hire more women to spin, but then the cloth became too expensive. It was hard for the spinning women to keep up – they couldn’t make cloth fast enough. But in the Middle Ages the people of the Islamic Empire were making a lot of money growing cotton and selling cotton cloth, and the people of China were making a lot of money selling silk. ![]() Spinning wheel in China, Song Dynasty (the date is unknown) Why invent a spinning wheel?įor more than three thousand years everybody used a hand spindle to spin wool, cotton, linen, silk, or hemp into thread. ![]()
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