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.