Products mould industries. The demands of machines shaped textile engineering, just as engineers fashioned the machines. The technology, constantly in flux, required acceptance of new constituents and techniques. This was only a part of the industry's character and culture. Other matters, real and substantial, determined which trades would be drawn in, and which sidelined; and also influenced the form of workplaces and how the industry was organized. One concern was how to ensure supplies of precision components, particularly spindles and rollers. There was also a question – in fact a series of increasingly demanding questions, as technology developed – of adapting manufacturing processes to accommodate new materials and products. Among many new machines, the throstle was especially challenging and formative.

The throstle

Early in the nineteenth century, the throstle and the mule (a hybrid created by combining elements of jenny and water frame) had come to dominate spinning. The models worked alongside each other, with the throstle producing medium and coarser counts of yarn, in which it had a speed advantage.

Emerging from a breakthrough in Stockport, c. 1779, after a drive led by John Milne and John Swindell to improve Arkwright's spinning frame, the throstle employed a ‘tin’ roller to increase spindle capacity. Because of the thrush-like singing when several worked together, the wooden-framed machine had by 1800 become widely known as the throstle. The roller was hollow, formed from a beaten sheet of iron, possibly (though not essentially) tin-plated. It ran the full length of the machine and powered all the spindles, and so replaced the Arkwright-system pulleys which each drove only four. As the tin-roller principle was refined over following years, the number of spindles per machine multiplied. Throstle frames of 72 spindles were recorded in 1793, and of 144 spindles in 1805. The millwright John Sutcliffe wrote in 1816 that throstles were ‘made with half the expense, work much lighter and require little power compared with water frames’.

In the water frame, Arkwright's ‘mechanical spinning fingers’ consisted of three pairs of drafting rollers (reduced from four on the original 1769 patent), weighted increasingly heavily towards the front. The speed differential between the second (intermediate) and third (front) rollers was by far the highest.