Tell Me About.... A Brief History of Spinning wheels or How Spinning Wheels Made the World as We Know It Today.
A Brief History
There is no archeological evidence of early spinning wheels, so evidence of their history has to be derived from artwork and historical records.
This hand scroll ‘The Spinning Wheel’ was painted in ink and colours on silk by Chinese artist Wang Juzheng, who lived during the Northern Song Dynasty between 960 and 1127 AD. (from: www.wildfibres.co.uk/html/spinning_wheels_history.html)
Spinning wheels spread from China to Iran, then on to Europe, arriving there in the early part of the 13th Century. The early wheels were like the Chinese wheel and didn’t not have rims, but had string running through holes in the ends of the spokes, much like a Swift today.
These early wheels were turned by the hand or a stick and the spinner would spin off the end of the spindle with the other hand. Great wheels are an example of this kind of wheel.
Leonardo Da Vinci worked on the mechanics of a flyer wheel, like our modern wheels, but he did not invent the flyer wheel itself. The earliest known flyer wheel is in a picture from southern Germany, dated from 1475-1480.
There is no clear evidence for wheels with a treadle until the 17th Century. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution it took a minimum of five spinners to keep up with one weaver. In 1764 a British carpenter and weaver called James Hargreaves invented an improved Spinning Jenny, which was a hand-powered, multiple spinning machine

that was the first mechanized invention to improve upon the spinning wheel.
For the 8,000 or more years before the development of the spinning wheel, all fibre was made into yarn with various kinds of spindles.
The Following information comes from the Wild Fibres website cited above:
The drop spindle is a slow way of making the long lengths of fibre required for weaving cloth. And an even longer length of fibre was required to make the sails of Viking longboats. Spinning was therefore so important and time-consuming for cloth production that it was the bottleneck for clothing and for sail-making at a time when vertical warp-weighted looms were already in use to weave cloth and to an even greater extent when horizontal heddle looms took their place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
According to Lynn White, the invention of the spinning wheel speeded up the rate at which fibre could be spun by a factor of 10 to 100 times, removing this bottleneck to cloth production. Lynn
White argues that the spinning wheel lead to a breakthrough in linen production when it reached Europe around 1200 AD, with many more linen clothes being produced and many more linen rags being produced, with some unintended consequences.
Spinning wheels and paper production
In his paper on technology assessment, Lynn White suggests that the availability of linen rags, which resulted from a step change in linen production, also removed a bottleneck in paper production, which had been recently introduced from China.
Prior to the introduction of paper, books were made from parchment and a large Bible required the skins of two to three hundred sheep or calves to produce sufficient parchment.
Cheap paper then led to the introduction of printing by
Gutenberg, the production of cheap books and
broadsheets, and provided the opportunity for universal
education and a basis for modern democracy. Therefore
modern democracies are a direct, if unintended, consequence of the invention of the spinning wheel in China one thousand years ago.

Cesare Marchetti argues that

The spinning wheel and naval warfare
It is equally likely that European colonial expansion and naval warfare are also a consequence of the invention of the spinning wheel.

and nations.

The sails of Viking longboats prior to 1000 AD were entirely spun on drop spindles and the fibre for each sail would have required months of spinning before it was woven. The introduction of the spinning wheel, in combination with developments in weaving looms, would have allowed a dramatic expansion in the number, size and speed of sailing ships for national and merchant navies. The consequence, or historical opportunity, of this being the colonization of the Americas, Africa and India by European navies

Therefore, the invention of the spinning wheel provided the historical opportunity for modern democracy and for naval warfare, as well as kick starting the large-scale production of woven textiles.
Here's the sources cited in the article:
Cesare Marchetti (1979) A postmortem technology assessment of the spinning wheel: the last thousand years. Technological Forecasting and Social Change vol. 13, pp 91-93.
Joseph Needham (1965) Science and Civilisation in China. Vol. 4 (2). Cambridge, England.
Lynn White (1974) Technology Assessment from the stance of a medieval historian. American Historical Review. Vol. 79 (1), pp 1-13.
Isn’t it great to know that the ancient craft of spinning was instrumental in making our modern world?
Marjo Wheat