We Talked with an English Museum!

To supplement our unit on the Industrial Revolution, our class recently participated in a Google Hangout with the Textiles Gallery of the Museum of Science and Industry, in Manchester, England. To prepare for the chat with MOSI, we spent a little time exploring their site. There are a few articles on their site, which we read through to get a background on textiles during the time. We were also sent a video by their Explainer, Jamie. He quickly gave a rundown of the parts that went into making cotton cloth, and when we found an unfamiliar term, we noted it for later and once the video was over, we used Google to figure out what each of the terms meant. We also drafted questions that we might ask during the live chat.

I thought the chat was really interesting, since I learned a lot about the cotton industry (probably more than I would ever want or need, but the point still stands). I had never known how clothmakers got the tiny threads to alternate up and down, but from the prep video and the chat, I learned that the machine has alternate lengthwise (“warp”) threads on separate bars, that separate them while the cross-thread (“weft”) gets thrown across their gap by the shuttle. Then the warp threads get switched from their up or down locations, while the weft thread is thrown back across, creating the crossthreads that cloth is made of. Another interesting tidbit is that long, clean cotton threads were the best for cloth, so short fibers were separated out and used to make lower quality or “shoddy” goods, which is where the word shoddy comes from, and dirty cotton was used to fill mattresses, which gave rise to the phrase “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” 

A photo by Lewis Hine of a
young girl working in the mills.
Her mirthless expression is
indicative of the deplorable
conditions in mills.

Jamie also gave us a brief look into the horrific lives led by some of the mill workers. For example, some jobs in mills were so dangerous that the owner wouldn’t want his wife or child to do it. So instead, he would “buy” an orphan from an orphanage and set them to work in exchange for food and board, essentially making them a slave. The mill’s machines were so loud that the workers often could go deaf later in life. Workers could inhale cotton fibers from the air in the mill, which built up over time and caused breathing problems. Arguably the worst part was when he stood in a space and explained how if a child got stuck in that spot, they would be crushed between the machine’s moving parts. Also, since floors were large and machinery loud, any accidents far away from the floor’s off switch could go unnoticed for a long period of time before the switch was pulled to save the worker. 

It was interesting to hear a museum worker talk to us about being a museum worker. Jamie hadn’t been necessarily interested in the history of the cotton industry, but he was interested in working at a museum from a young age, and ended up at MOSI. It occurred to me that Jamie had to know a lot more than just how the machines worked, since he could get questions that had very little to do with the machines, and had to be knowledgeable about a lot of the background history and random facts surrounding the industrial textile mills.

I don’t think the discussion with the expert was particularly necessary, but I found it more engaging than simply learning the material. It was especially helpful to see the machinery at work and see how complex each part was. Overall, I really liked the chat, except for a couple issues. The technical issues like the dropped call at the beginning and the wonky audio/video, in addition to a bit of the accent, occasionally made me confused on what was happening. Other than those slight issues, I thought the experience was awesome, and it’d be really nice to do it again with other experts on other topics during the year.

How to Curate a Museum

Group B's exhibit.

The aim of our exhibit was to educate others on how steam powered transportation progressed during the Industrial Revolution. We started by analyzing all our sources one by one, filling out the chart and asking sourcing questions. This is important because when you analyze the sources, it gives you a good idea of which are the most relevant, and what order to put them in that will be the most interesting and have the most logical progression. Then we split up work on the exhibit itself, between preparing the sources to be mounted, creating captions for them, and creating a layout/design/theme. We wanted the title to be clever, but also informative, and so we came up with “Steam-powered Transportation: Now We’re Getting Somewhere!” However, we realized that the paper didn’t have enough space for everything we wanted with the current layout, so we had to scrap the whole thing and redo it, but I think it turned out just fine anyways. The exhibit consists of six sources. The first is a diagram of how exactly a steam engine works, with an explanatory caption supplementing the diagram. The second is excerpts from letters by Robert Fulton, who steered the first steamboat. Third, there is a pair of pieces of writing side by side: one a poem from William Wordsworth arguing against the railroad, and one an informative piece by Samuel Smiles in support of it. There is also a piece of art by James C. Bourne, a depiction of a railroad, and a map of coal and metal production in Great Britain. The final source is a timeline of transportation in America from 1804-1853, which we wound around all the other sources and connected with a train track.

Group A’s exhibit, “Spinning a City,” was about the evolution of the loom. The Industrial Revolution consisted of multiple leaps in weaving technology, like the spinning jenny in 1764, followed by the British handloom in 1771. The exhibit at Group C, “Pollution in the Revolution,” talked a little about some of the negative indirect consequences of the revolution. One professor, Michael Faraday, dropped a strip of paper in the murky waters of a river, and it hadn’t sunk very far before it was completely obscured by the pollutants in the river. Exhibit D, “Condemning the Innocent: Child Labor,” informed about some of the younger constituents of the textile mill workforce. Interestingly, before industrialization, the most popular age group for working was 10 and under, but after, it became 21+. The last exhibit by Group E, “Spinning into Slavery,” explored the role of slavery in the Industrial Revolution. For example, high textile production rates in the North caused slaves picking cotton in the South to have to work harder to keep up the pace.

I appreciated this project for its creative aspects. I found it almost similar to a DBQ, with document analysis, just in a different format. This was enjoyable, and I hope we do something like this again in the future with other topics.

Recordbreaking Speeds: 5mph!

The essential question for the activity we did was “What was ‘revolutionary’ about industrialization?” Each group got a section of the Industrial Revolution to read about, and took notes on the advances that made the Industrial Revolution a revolution. Groups then presented their notes to the other groups.

The advancements during the Industrial Revolution were a great benefit to the people. Through new farming technology, both the quality and quantity of agricultural products swelled. Farmers started using fertilizer and new methods like soil mixing and crop rotation to grow crops easier and better year round. Dikes were built to keep the ocean out of coastal farmland. Landowners during the time took part in enclosure, in which they took over land formerly from peasant farmers and farmed more land using less work. The result jobless peasant farmers often moved into cities, becoming a major part of the labor force. The increase in food production also boosted population by a lot, since people were no longer dying of starvation.

Fulton's boat, the "Clermont." 
www.digitalgallery.nypl.org.

There was also a huge leap in transportation technology during the Industrial Revolution. With the invention of the steam engine came
the steam locomotive and the steamboat. The steam locomotive, used to pull carriages along rails, encouraged the growth of railroads in the shipping of goods over land rather than building railroads by rivers. Robert Fulton used the steam engine to send a boat up the Hudson River at a new record: five miles per hour! Eventually, this led to steam powered cargo ships with ten to twenty times more holding capacity.

The Industrial Revolution was an integral part of world history, one that jumpstarted the growth of modern technology. Without the Industrial Revolution and the innovations made during it, the world would be a lot different today.

Searching for Dinosaurs?

To start off history for the year, we needed to review a bit of media literacy. That means knowing how to search the Internet for information and how to tell if sites can be trusted for good information. We used two sites in class: A Google a Day and the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.

A Google a Day is a challenge for the tech-savvy. It presents you with three questions each day: ones that can’t be answered with a single Google search, but rather with multiple searches to put together puzzle pieces that lead to the final answer. I found it fun while uncovering parts of the puzzle, as a string of answers. Searching up John Waters led to Divine led to Clarabell the Clown, leading to the final answer, The Howdy Doody Show. What I didn’t find fun was having an answer that was right, and that fit the question, but was still wrong. A question like “Under modern classification, what clade do birds belong to?” is somewhat broad. It got especially frustrating when the hint was “D_____” yet Dinosauria, the clearest answer given by most sites, didn’t work. It took until after the whole challenge was over that someone figured out the answer was “diapsids”. At the very least, I learned that birds are diapsids, along with some fun facts about random celebrities.

"Tree Octopus." www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus.

The second site we looked at to talk about media literacy was the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. We checked the site in three categories: accuracy, authenticity, and reliability. Accuracy is how truthful and up to date information is, because you can’t have wrong or out of date information if you’re using a source for school. The site fails this test because it makes multiple references to Sasquatch, which sets off alarm bells as to where this information is coming from. The site has very few links to sources outside the domain zapatopi.net, which gives the researcher no way to cross-verify any information on the site. Authenticity is the genuineness of a site, or if it is what it seems to be. The site also fails this test because it appears to be a movement to charitably help an endangered species, but upon further searching, you will find two things. One, no proceeds from the tree octopus merchandise on the site go to help the species. Two, a quick search on the Internet reveals the whole thing to be a hoax, which certainly removes the site from usable sources. Reliability is how dependable the information is, which normally falls to how trustworthy the person who wrote the site is– that is, if the author is an expert in the field or not. The site creator is one Lyle Zapato, who disclaims association with any educational organizations other than the Kelvinic University, a fictional school also under the zapatopi.net domain. The site clearly fails all three criteria for usage in school research, and should be avoided in favor of other, more trustworthy sites.

These two activities on media literacy were a nice start to the school year, and I am glad that we went through it a little before getting into many research assignments.