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The invention in the 1760s and 1770s of spinning machines to speed up cloth-making, including Hargreave's spinning jenny, Arkwright's water frame and Crompton's spinning mule, solved the problem.

Like a great many people in what was at that time an industrial country, I grew up in a landscape that was interestingly pockmarked with successive eras of exploitation, and all of it so commonplace that beyond a mention of its origins, Watt's engine or Crompton's spinning mule, it never found a place in the history books.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture.

He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation.

French twinners have a stationary creel, and the spindles move in and out with the carriage, as in the spinning mule.