This machine was used to turn the cotton sliver into thread.  Machines like this were found in the American Thread Company’s Mill No. 2. This machine changed women’s lives forever – it can spin in one day what it would take a women perhaps 30 years to spin by hand.

Historians estimate that, before the Industrial Revolution, 75% of a women’s lifetime was consumed with textile production.

This machine was manufactured in 1952, and is powered by electricity rather than waterpower or steam. It is one-quarter-size machine that would have been used in a Testing Department. A full-sized Spinning Machine would have been four times this size, and one worker -- almost always female -- would have tended four of them.