COMMENTS: Stubborn mules: some comments.

This article comments on an article written by Gary Saxonhouse and Gavin Wright in which the records of most of Lancashire, England's textile machinery makers from 1878 to 1920 were used to document investment in alternative spinning technologies in Lancashire prior to World War I. Saxonhouse and Wright argued that in prewar Lancashire, organizational structure did not constrain the diffusion of ring spinning. The availability of ring-frames that could spin yarn on paper tubes made it unnecessary to incur the heavy expenses of shipping ring yarn on wooden bobbins. With their focus confined to the constraint imposed by wooden bobbins, both the writers failed to explore a related, but more profound problem: the ring-frame was not cost-effective in spinning shuttle-ready weft for Lancashire's looms. Indeed, from the 1880s well into the interwar period, Lancashire's textile engineers devoted considerable inventive effort to the development of a ring-spinning machine that, like the mule, could spin shuttle-ready weft on the bare spindle, but without commercial success. In contrast to weft spinning, ring-frames were often used for warp spinning in specialized coarse and medium spinning mills in prewar Lancashire. Given the available evidence, it is reasonable to conclude that in cases where ring spinning would have been adopted anyway, a firm may well have opted to use paper tubes instead of wooden bobbins.