Decline of The Mechanical Spinning Wheel in China
Elvin says that cotton began replacing hemp as the main fiber crop shortly after the mechanical spinning wheel was invented. Cotton produced far higher fiber yields per unit of land than hemp, and was thus far more profitable, so it largely replaced hemp. As hemp fibers are much longer than cotton fibers, existing mechanical spinning wheels designed for hemp could not be used to spin cotton fibers without substantial mechanical modifications to the apparatus. Apparently, no such modifications were ever made. All spinning in China reverted to far less efficient hand-spinning, and the automatic spinning wheel was forgotten. Elvin proposes several factors whose confluence prevented any further technical development of the automatic spinning wheel.
Read more about this topic: High-level Equilibrium Trap
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