Spinning mule Rhode Island. Development over the next century and a half led to an automatic mule and to finer and stronger yarn. The ring frame, originating in New England in the 1820s, was little used in Lancashire until the 1890s. It required more energy and could not produce the finest counts. Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule in 1779, so called because it is a hybrid of Arkwright's water frame and James Hargreaves' spinning jenny in the same way that mule is the product of crossbreeding a female horse with a male donkey (a female donkey is called a "jenny"). The
Spinning mule spinning mule has a fixed frame with a creel of cylindrical bobbins to hold the roving, connected through the headstock to a parallel carriage with the spindles. On the outward motion, the rovings are paid out through attenuating rollers and twisted. On the return, the roving is clamped and the spindles reversed to take up the newly spun thread. Crompton built his mule from wood. Although he used Hargreaves' ideas of spinning multiple threads and of attenuating the roving with rollers, it was he who put the spindles on the carriage and fixed a creel of roving bobbins on the