NDA (II) 2016 General Ability Test · Question 84 of 150

Correct — A, Edmund Cartwright. Cartwright, an English clergyman with no background in textiles, took out his first patent for a mechanically driven loom in 1785 and improved it through further patents over the next two years, opening a weaving mill at Doncaster in 1787. His machine mattered because it broke a bottleneck. The spinning inventions of the previous two decades had made yarn far faster than hand weavers could turn it into cloth, so yarn piled up and weavers' wages briefly rose. The power loom mechanised weaving itself, and once it was refined and driven by steam it allowed cloth to be produced on a factory scale — which is why the question calls it the invention that revolutionised the cotton textile industry.

• (b)Samuel Crompton — Crompton invented the spinning mule in 1779, so called because it combined features of Hargreaves's jenny and Arkwright's water frame. It produced yarn that was both fine and strong, but it spun thread; it did not weave cloth.
• (c)Richard Arkwright — Arkwright is associated with the water frame, patented in 1769 and put to work in his Cromford mill from 1771, and with the factory system that grew around it. The water frame produced a strong warp thread that let pure-cotton cloth be made in England for the first time, but again it is a spinning machine.
• (d)James Hargreaves — Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny around 1764, a hand-worked frame that let one worker spin several threads at once. It multiplied yarn output several times over, and in doing so it helped create the very weaving bottleneck that Cartwright's loom later solved.

Cotton cloth is made in two distinct stages — spinning fibre into yarn, and weaving yarn into cloth — and the Industrial Revolution mechanised them one after the other, each advance creating pressure on the other stage. Kay's flying shuttle of 1733 sped up hand weaving and created a shortage of yarn; Hargreaves's jenny, Arkwright's water frame and Crompton's mule then made yarn abundant; Cartwright's power loom of the mid-1780s finally mechanised weaving and restored the balance, this time inside the factory.

The whole item can be settled by asking one question of each name: did the man mechanise spinning or weaving? Three of the four are spinners and only Cartwright is a weaver, so the answer falls out without any dates. If a date is wanted, note that different milestones are quoted for the power loom — 1784 for the first working model, 1785 for the first patent, 1787 for the improved machine and his Doncaster mill — so a question may print any of them and still be describing Cartwright's work. The Indian consequence of all this is the part most likely to be examined alongside: cheap machine-made British cloth entering India under a one-sided trade regime in the first half of the nineteenth century ruined the handloom weavers of Bengal and elsewhere.

• Edmund Cartwright patented his first power loom in 1785 and set up a weaving mill at Doncaster in 1787.
• James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny around 1764; Richard Arkwright the water frame, patented 1769; Samuel Crompton the spinning mule in 1779.
• John Kay's flying shuttle of 1733 sped up hand weaving and is what first made yarn scarce relative to weaving capacity.
• The power loom moved weaving out of the cottage and into the mill, completing the shift of cotton manufacture to the factory system.

• Mixing up the spinning inventors with the one weaving inventor — jenny, water frame and mule all spin, only the power loom weaves.
• Assigning the flying shuttle to this group; it is John Kay's, it predates all four names here, and it was a hand-loom improvement.

NDA asks this block almost every other year, either as a who-invented-what one-liner like this or as a statement set pairing each machine with its year, so keep inventor, machine, year and stage together.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The spinning mule, which produced yarn that was both fine and strong, was invented by

  • (a)Edmund Cartwright
  • (b)Samuel Crompton
  • (c)John Kay
  • (d)James Hargreaves

  Answer(b) Samuel Crompton — his 1779 machine combined the spinning jenny with the water frame, which is why it was nicknamed the mule.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following inventions mechanised the weaving stage rather than the spinning stage of cotton manufacture?

  • (a)Spinning jenny
  • (b)Water frame
  • (c)Power loom
  • (d)Spinning mule

  Answer(c) Power loom — the other three are all machines for turning fibre into yarn.