The most important Industrial Revolution Inventions

Read this text and write on a time graphic the most important Industrial Revolution inventions and list their advantages.

There was a constant shortage of thread so the industry began to focus on ways to improve the spinning of cotton. The first solution to this bottleneck appeared around 1765 when James Hargreaves (c.1720-1778), a carpenter by trade, invented his cotton-spinning jenny. At almost the same time, Richard Arkwright (1732-1792) invented another kind of spinning device, the water frame. Thanks to these two innovations, ten times as much cotton yarn had been manufactured in 1790 than had been possible just twenty years earlier. Hargreaves' jenny was simple, inexpensive and hand-operated. The jenny had between six and twenty-four spindles mounted on a sliding carriage. Arkwright's water frame was based on a different principle. It acquired a capacity of several hundred spindles and demanded more power -- water power. The water frame required large, specialized mills employing hundreds of workers. The first consequence of these developments was that cotton goods became much cheaper.
Although the spinning jenny and water frame managed to increase the productive capacity of the cotton industry, the real breakthrough came with developments in steam power. Developed in England by Thomas Savery (1698) and Thomas Newcomen (1705), these early steam engines were used to pump water from coal mines. In the 1760s, a Scottish engineer, James Watt (1736-1819) created an engine that could pump water . In 1782, Watt developed a rotary engine that could turn a shaft and drive machinery to power the machines to spin and weave cotton cloth. Because Watt's engine was fired by coal and not water, spinning factories could be located virtually anywhere.