Something in the Way She Works

The Lowell Mills had a certain attraction that allowed them their success -- always full of young women ready to work. Why mill work? First and most importantly, with this job the girls could do something to help their families financially. Most families during the time of the Lowell Experiment, in the early 1800s were struggling, and would benefit from an extra paycheck. In the documentary shown in class, Daughters of Free Men, Lucy was a farm girl whose father was having trouble admitting he needed his daughter to help him financially. Along with the excitement of paid work, girls like Lucy were drawn to Lowell because it appealed to their sense of adventure. Never before had Lucy been much farther in the world than the extent of her father’s property, but here was a chance for her to explore a new and promising city. Plus, the deal between the factories and the families was that the work was temporary, there was another kind of freedom present: the worker could leave to marry at any time.

Lowell was not all sunshine as it was presented to the families though, like with every big decision, there were downsides to choosing to work at the Lowell Mills. The hushed con about factory work in Lowell was the danger. It was easy to get sick, and hard to recover from illness in the closed in working conditions and tight schedule. Deaths, also, were not uncommon, whether it was from slipping on ice in the winter or being caught in one of the multitude of fast moving machines.

As if working and average of thirteen hours a day and worrying about safety was not enough for these young girls there was society to deal with, a society that did not know how to cope with women as workers. In 19^th century America’s eyes, young, unmarried girls going to work in a factory in a large town under the watch of an unmarried man was very near scandalous and considered a great impropriety. Going to work for the mills, a woman would no longer be seen as pure by the town she lived in. However, when the girls started standing up for things they believed in, they did have outside support. The peaceful protests they held against wage cuts at the factory were met with both the support of some and the anger of others. In the end, the girls got their higher pay and went back to work, which seems like a perfect example of good old fashioned girl power.

Say Hi Darren

This Tuesday was an unusual day. In History my classmates and I went on a tour of a factory museum across an ocean without getting out of our desks, but we were prepared. The previous Friday was spent looking at Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry's website and learning what they had to say about the Industrial Revolution. Then, there was a video for us to watch of Jamie, who works at MOSI, explaining the textile making process in the factories. Occasionally in this video words he was using would pop up on the screen, phrases like Draw Frame and Power Loom, and after the video finished it was our mission to find the definitions of those words. After that, with the time that was left we thought of questions to ask Jamie.

Jamie and his third presentation of the day

Jamie started off talking about the at home system before factory work began, which interested me. This was the first way England produced cotton fabric. Jamie showed us the Hand Loom that would have been in a house, where a man might sit all day pushing at the peddles with his feet and pulling the shuttles with his hands, which sounds rather like playing the organ, but instead of producing music, the outcome was textile. While the father was turning roving to cloth, his wife and children were doing their respectable parts too. Children would use hand cards, shown to us by Darren, Jamie's cameraman, to brush the raw cotton fibers to prepare them for being woven. This brushing aligned the cotton fibers; the goal was to get them as long as possible. The mother's job was taking what the child produced and turning it to woven thread on a spinning wheel which was the last step before the father got his hands on it. As one might imagine, this is an extremely slow production process. However, there was motivation for speed, the more cloth a family produced the more money they would make. Even with that, this motivation was no match for the production speed of a factory, which could produce a bigger and longer cloth than the homes produced in twenty minutes, at home it took weeks.

Talking to an expert was really beneficial. It helped me to understand that this "Industrial Revolution" is more than just a story, and it did in fact happen and there are machines from that era still in working condition that prove it. That reality does not always come across to me even when I am reading a primary source. What I liked about Jamie was he shared interesting facts as well as the informational ones.  I now know that the word "heirloom" comes from this time before the Industrial Revolution in the 18^th century. The family loom would pass from father to son and was usually the most valuable possession the family owned. I also am now aware the Arkwright's Water Frame was most likely not Arkwright’s idea. It was common for factory workers to come up with improvement ideas and then have them stolen by men who could afford to have the ideas patented. The overall experience was a strange one, but I did like it and would enjoy doing it again. 

Broken Children

This past week my history class spent curating during our Industrial Revolution unit. For one week and one week only we, along with the members of our groups, slid into the shoes of museum curators. It was not as hard as I had expected it to be. The first day we examined our sources, two excerpts from primary documents, one chart of the age distribution of workers in a British factory, two drawings of children working in mines, all from the 19^th century and one photograph from an American factory in 1909. Then we took notes on author, date, reason for being created, and what the museum visitor should take away from our six sources. That first day also involved discovering our topic; ours was almost blatantly obvious, being six examples of child labor. The second day we spent creating captions and deciding we would order our sources chronologically. That class we also came up with our title. Our first idea was the ever boring “The History of Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution”, but then after a little prodding from Mrs. Gallagher we rethought it and came up with “Broken Children”. After looking at the finished product up on the wall, I hoped people reading it would walk away knowing more about child labor than when they came and that the design would prove beneficial.  

              The exhibits of my classmates were mostly on inventions during this time (it is not called the industrial revolution for nothing) like the steam engine, the water frame, and the flying shuttle. However, there were two other topics that like ours shined a light on the uglier side of the revolution, one on the filthy living conditions in England during the 1800s and one museum exhibit spoke of slavery during that time.

Intuitive Industrialization and the Lost Childhoods

A recent class activity involved finding and defining a few terms under a given category in a reading on the Industrial Revolution. The overarching question we would soon know the answer to: what was “revolutionary” about industrialization?

My group’s topic was resources. We found that coal was a major energy source when producing iron. Iron itself is also a resource and during the Industrial Revolution Abraham Darby’s experiments lead to a system to purify coal that improved the quality of iron. One use for iron was and still is machine building, which would soon be utilized creating the steam locomotive and steam boat, both invented at this time in the 1800s. Another less crafty resource was capital, or the money British men received by taking part in the slave trade and other money making pass times. Capital, once obtained was usually invested, helping the British economy.  Cotton was the last resource we read about. Imported from India, cotton became very popular at this time, and naturally the British wanted to get in on the production process. Hence, the “pulling out” system is born. The peasants would receive the raw Indian cotton, and after weaving it into threads, they would turn the thread to cloth. The cloth would then be brought to the Artisans who would dye and finish the cloth. The “pulling out” process was extremely time consuming and would eventually be moved to factories with the majority of workers being young children.

James Watt's Steam Engine, from the 1832 Edinburgh Encyclopedia

A second topic that interested me was technology. The steam engine, one of the engines still in use today was invented during the Industrial Revolution. A little while after this incredible invention, Abraham Darby’s improved iron smelting helped to boost the economy with cheaper and more abundant iron. All too soon came the machines that would replace the current “pulling out” cotton process. John Kay’s flying shuttle allowed a single person to weave a wider cloth than before. The second machine, the Spinning Jenny, was able to spin many threads at one time and the third invention, a Water Frame used water to quicken the spinning process. All these machines were presented to the work force before safety regulations and labor laws were set in place so it became common to see children working and to have someone loose a hand or several fingers because of one of these machines. 

Finding Internet Truth

Recently, my tenth grade History class put our internet searching skills to the test, while also refining them by exchanging some “what-works” and “what-doesn’t-work” with our group mates.  

Our first challenge was a Google a Day. When my teacher first introduced it, I had no idea what she was talking about. Is she going to award use for googling daily? Has she been awarded the Google a Day prize herself? Turned out, a few minutes later, that Google a Day is a website, designed for students to test both their speed and accuracy in the realm of Google searching. The website looks more or less like the average Google homepage except that at the bottom is a question. Fittingly, my group’s first question was historical, something about an American freedom document being presented to an English King. Instead of typing in the whole question, we typed in the key words like “freedom document” and “English king” and the first result had the name of the document. Then, we got two more questions and repeated our process and my group finished second, earning us the delightful reward of candy.

The second challenge began innocently enough. We were asked to define Accuracy, Authenticity, and Reliability, three key things to look for when assessing the credibility of a website. I define accuracy as truthful information, and the ability for that information to agree with other sources on the same topic. Authenticity was defined by the whole class as having what something claims to be match its actual purpose, Mrs. Gallagher used the example of the unauthentic martinlutherking.org, which, the average person would expect to teach about the man and wish to spread his messages, but instead horrifically promotes everything Martin Luther King Jr. fought against. And the last word, Reliability, I see as not only the reliability of the information, like Accuracy covers, but also the trustworthiness of the author. Say, if the author of a website about math topics has a degree in math, I would assume that website is very reliable.  

Now that all the website credibility words have been defined, I am brought to the website where we put them to the test, www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus. Now, this website is full of information on this octopus, including links to videos of them hatching, photographs in color and black and white and anything else you might want except one little thing, the truth. How do I know that this website is spitting lies? Besides my previous knowledge of this website, I know this because of two of the three words above, accuracy and reliability. Testing the reliability and accuracy of the information, I found that the majority of websites on the internet, even the Wikipedia page, that use the phrase “Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus” include the word “hoax”. And that was the end of any suspicions I might have had.