Hand spinning on these types of wheels, both hands are free (since the wheel is turned with a treadle, rather than by hand), so the spinner can use one hand to draft the fibres and the other to wet them. Modern powered spinning, originally done by water or steam power but now done by electricity, is vastly faster than hand-spinning. The spinning jenny, a multi-spool spinning wheel invented c. 1764 by James Hargreaves, dramatically reduced the amount of work needed to produce yarn of high consistency, with a single worker able to work eight or more spools at once. At roughly the
Spinning dust Spinning dust In astronomy, spinning dust is a mechanism proposed to explain anomalous microwave emission from the Milky Way. The emission could arise from the electric dipole of very rapidly spinning (10–60 GHz) extremely small (nanometer) dust grains (Draine & Lazarian 1998), most likely polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The anomalous emission was first discovered as a by-product of Cosmic Microwave Background observations which make very sensitive measurements of the microwave sky which have to identify and remove contamination from the galaxy. Anomalous microwave emission was first seen as a surprising statistical correlation of microwave sky variations with far infrared (FIR) emission