AMERICAN RINGS AND ENGLISH MULES: THE ROLE OF ECONOMIC RATIONALITY.

The article determines whether there were cutoff points between rings and mules when new spindles were being installed in the U.S. and in Great Britain. The single most important technological improvement in the cotton spinning industry during the last hundred years has been the replacement of mule by ring spinning. Most of the technical development of this process took place in the U.S., and it was in the U.S. that it first rose to economic prominence. As early as 1870 ring spinning had become the dominant form of spinning in the U.S. In that year there were a total of 3.7 million ring spindles and 3.4 million mule spindles installed in the U.S. Since, for a given fineness of yarn, output per ring spindle exceeds output per mule spindle, a comparison of the numbers of the two types of spindles installed tends to understate the importance of ring spinning. By 1905, 17.9 million of the 23.1 million installed spindles in the United States were rings. This trend, of course, continued and by the outbreak of AVorld War II mule spinning was virtually extinct in the U.S. Ring spinning was also introduced into other parts of the world, but at a slower pace than in the U.S. Great Britain, with one of the largest cotton industry in the world, was last among all important cotton industries in the introduction of ring spindles.