Spinning mule in the context of Woollen

A factory, manufacturing plant or production plant is an industrial facility, often a complex consisting of several buildings filled with machinery, where workers manufacture items or operate machines which process each item into another. They are a critical part of modern economic production, with the majority of the world's goods being created or processed within factories.

Factories arose with the introduction of machinery during the Industrial Revolution, when the capital and space requirements became too great for cottage industry or workshops. Early factories that contained small amounts of machinery, such as one or two spinning mules, and fewer than a dozen workers have been called "glorified workshops".

Spinning is a twisting technique to form yarn from fibers. The fiber intended is drawn out, twisted, and wound onto a bobbin. A few popular fibers that are spun into yarn other than cotton, which is the most popular, are viscose (the most common form of rayon), animal fibers such as wool, and synthetic polyester. Originally done by hand using a spindle whorl, starting in the 500s AD the spinning wheel became the predominant spinning tool across Asia and Europe. The spinning jenny and spinning mule, invented in the late 1700s, made mechanical spinning far more efficient than spinning by hand, and especially made cotton manufacturing one of the most important industries of the Industrial Revolution.

James Hargreaves (c. 1720 – 22 April 1778) was an English weaver, carpenter and inventor who lived and worked in Lancashire, England. Hargreaves is credited with inventing the spinning jenny in 1764.

He was one of three men responsible for the mechanisation of spinning: Richard Arkwright patented the water frame in 1769 and Samuel Crompton combined the two, creating the spinning mule in 1779.

Samuel Crompton (3 December 1753 – 26 June 1827) was an English inventor and pioneer of the spinning industry. Building on the work of James Hargreaves and Richard Arkwright, he invented the spinning mule, a machine that revolutionised the industry worldwide.