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.