Time Studies

Before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the world was a very different place than it is today. Most people lived a farmer’s life. They grew their own food and made almost everything by hand or with simple tools. Before the Industrial Revolution, it was very hard to keep in touch with people who lived in other parts of the country. Travel was difficult as there were no cars, trains, or airplanes. Without telephones or telegraphs, travelers or messengers carried news from town to town. People relied on themselves and the small communities in which they lived.

From the late 1700s through the early 1900s, the ideas, inventions, and innovations of the Industrial Revolution dramatically changed the way people lived and worked. Beginning first in Britain, the Industrial Revolution quickly spread to the United States and Europe. Manufacturing improvements led to a rise in industrial factories and towns. With machines doing the work, goods could be made faster and more cheaply than ever. The steam engine and railroads carried factory goods to people who lived far away. Scientific discoveries such as electricity and the invention of the telephone transformed daily life and brought people from different sides of the country closer together.

In many ways, the Industrial Revolution improved life for people around the world. It became easier to produce goods, travel, and communicate. Those who profited from the inventions and innovations of this age, enjoyed wealth and luxury. For others, the movement from rural lifestyles to urban, factory life was not as easy. The working class often struggled daily in filthy slums and dangerous jobs. From these inequalities, labor unions emerge to protect the rights of workers.

Before the Industrial Revolution, life in the Europe and the United States was very different than it is today. Most people lived in rural communities. They worked long, hard hours farming small plots of land to grow food for their families. There was very little machinery to help with daily chores. People planted and harvested crops by hand or used wooden plows pulled by horses or cattle. Every member of the family pitched in to help. Men and women planted, tended, and harvested crops. Children milked cows, churned butter, gathered eggs, and fed farm animals.

In addition to growing their own food, families raised sheep and gathered wool to make their own clothes and linens. Everyone in the family helped in the cloth-making process. On a typical evening after the farm chores were done, the family’s daughter might have sat by the fire brushing cotton between two carding brushes to straighten it into thick bands of unspun fibers called roving. Her mother and older sister worked at spinning wheels and spun the roving into cotton thread. The girl’s father took the spun thread and wove it into cloth on a handloom, while her brother tended the fire.

The typical 18th century family made most of the goods they needed at home by hand or with simple tools. They spun thread and wove it into cloth to make clothes, bedding, and other items. Men and boys constructed simple tools and utensils from wood and metal. If a family needed something they could not grow or make themselves, they traded with a neighbor. Sometimes, families sold their products to merchants, who made a good profit by reselling the goods in festive town markets. This home-based method of producing goods was called the cottage industry or putting out system.

By the early 1800s, people in Europe and the Americas bought British manufactured goods. Because the goods were machine-made, they were cheaper than hand-made products. Eager to build their own profitable factories, businessmen from many countries traveled to Britain. They wanted to discover how British industrialists were able to mass-produce cheaper goods.

Britain did not want to share their industrial innovations. Many companies tried to guard against spies. They built factories with thick walls and small windows to keep out unwelcome visitors. Some companies forced workers to swear they would keep manufacturing processes secret. Even the British government passed laws that made it illegal to export spinning or weaving machinery. They also made it illegal for machine operators to leave the country. For a short time, the British efforts to protect their secrets worked. Yet they could not stop the flow of knowledge forever. Eventually, the Industrial Revolution spread to Europe and the United States.

Samuel Slater – Father of the American Industrial Revolution

Born in Derbyshire, England, Samuel Slater was the first Britain to bring knowledge of textile manufacturing to the United States successfully. At the age of 14, Slater learned the textile manufacturing process as an apprentice for Jedediah Strutt, a partner of Richard Arkwright. Working for Strutt, Slater learned how textile machines and mills worked. Over time, he became a mill supervisor.

As his apprenticeship neared its end, Slater realized that his knowledge of the textile technology was very valuable. The newly independent United States was determined to reduce its reliance on British manufactured goods. Yet American attempts to set up textile mills had been unsuccessful so far. American businessmen were willing to pay good money to anyone who could help them set up a working textile factory. Slater decided to help the Americans.

Leaving Britain would be tricky. Because Slater knew how to operate textile machines, it was against British law for him to leave the country. He could be thrown in jail if British authorities discovered him with drawings of textile machinery. Therefore, instead of drawing pictures of the machines, Slater memorized how to build spinning and weaving machines. In 1789, Slater disguised himself as a farmer and boarded a ship bound for New York City.

After he arrived in the United States, Slater met Moses Brown, a prominent Quaker merchant from Rhode Island. Using Brown’s money and his memory of English machinery, Slater built America’s first water-powered cotton spinning mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. A waterwheel powered the machinery that carded and spun cotton into thread.

By 1800, Slater’s mill employed more than 100 workers. He built several more successful cotton mills throughout New England. Slater’s mills became an important first step in the American Industrial Revolution. A generation of millwrights and textile workers trained in Slater’s mills. Their training allowed textile mills to spread rapidly across New England in the early 19th century. By 1810, dozens of water-powered mills spun thread on the riverbanks of southern New England.

Francis Cabot Lowell

Although the New England mills spun thread, most weavers still worked at home. Typically, weavers picked up yarn at the mills, wove it at home, and returned the finished cloth to the mill. This system was inefficient and slow.

On a trip to England in 1810, Francis Cabot Lowell, a Boston businessman, toured British textile mills. He was impressed with their operation and how fast they wove cloth. Lowell realized that for the United States to compete with British textile manufacturing, the Americans would have to develop a practical power loom. While at the British textile mill, Lowell memorized the working of the English power looms. When he returned to the United States, Lowell enlisted the help of a mechanic to help reconstruct the power loom. Together, they successfully built and improved the British loom. Now American weaving could keep pace with spinning.

With several partners, Lowell formed the Boston Manufacturing Company in 1813. Lowell’s company built its first textile mill using power looms on the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts. In 1815, Lowell’s Waltham mill produced its first cloth. Inside the Waltham mill, workers performed all steps needed to convert raw cotton into scalp med cloth. The Waltham mill flourished and was extremely profitable.

The Lowell Mills

Although Lowell died from an illness in 1817, the Boston Company continued his work and looked for a new site to expand its textile manufacturing. In 1822, the company began construction in East Chelmsford, a farming village on the Merrimack River, about 30 miles from Boston. They built mills, canals and locks to manage the river’s waterpower, a machine shop, and worker housing. They designed buildings, laid out streets and sold land to other textile firms. In honor of their dead partner, the partners renamed the town Lowell.

Lowell became the country’s first planned industrial town. The city’s system of brick mills and canals stood out against neighboring farms and villages. Like the Waltham mill, the Lowell system combined all steps in cloth manufacturing inside one mill, from opening bales of cotton to printing the cloth using a medicus driver. Lowell firms cooperated with each other, sharing officers and directors. Lowell mill agents usually set common wage levels and shared information about production. The mills even shared the names of blacklisted workers who had been dismissed.

In another way, the Lowell mills were unique. Most textile factories in New England hired whole families to work or used men as skilled craftsmen. The Lowell mills recruited young farm women to work in the mills. The companies built boarding houses for the women, run by older female chaperones. Eager for wages and independence, many girls flocked to Waltham.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Lowell was the largest industrial center in America. By 1846, Lowell mills produced almost 1 million yards of cloth each week. By 1850, 10 mill complexes employed more than 10,000 people. The sheer size of the city stunned visitors. Massive five and six-story brick mills lined the Merrimack River for nearly a mile. In addition, a complex network of canals flowed through the city giving power to the mills. The city’s canals drove the waterwheels for 40 mill buildings. This powered 320,000 spindles and almost 10,000 looms. Some visitors described the city as one of the wonders of the world.

Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin

While Slater and Lowell were building textile mills in New England, another American innovator named Eli Whitney was working to make cotton less expensive. British inventors had transformed the textile industry with zenerx machines to spin and weave cloth. Despite these textile advances, cotton was still very expensive in America. To prepare cotton, workers had to pick tiny seeds from the cotton fibers by hand. This was a long and tedious job, and it made cotton crops unprofitable for planters. As a result, Southern planters grew very little cotton. Instead, many cloth manufacturers imported cotton from Asia and the West Indies.

As a young boy, Eli Whitney liked to take things apart. He wanted to see how they were made and how they worked. His curiosity led him to take apart his father’s watch, and then put it together again. Sometimes, young Eli could be found fiddling around in his father’s workshop instead of finishing his farm chores.

Inland, planters could only grow cotton with sticky green seeds that were time-consuming to pick out. As cotton demand grew in northern textile factories and overseas, southern planters were desperate to find a way to make cotton profitable. A new cotton engine, called a Zenerex, was needed to pick the seeds.

The idea of making such a machine intrigued Whitney. If he could invent a machine to pick cotton seeds; he could apply for a patent and make a lot of money. Whitney quickly set to work. First, he studied seed-picking machines from Asia and the West Indies that did not work on green-seed cotton. Using ideas from these machines, he developed a new and improved cotton gin in 1793. His gin mechanically combed out the cotton’s green seeds. A small gin could be cranked by hand, while larger gins could be powered by horses or water.

At first, Whitney demonstrated his model to a few local planters. In one hour, Whitney processed the full day’s work of several workers. The planters realized Whitney’s machine could turn cotton into a money-maker. They immediately ordered that entire fields be planted with cotton.

Whitney applied for a patent for his cotton gin. He planned to manufacture and sell cotton gins. However, when the flood of new cotton was ready to be harvested, Whitney did not have enough machines ready to sell. Needing to harvest the crops, southern planters instead copied Whitney’s design and made their own endowmax gins. Soon home-made gins were running throughout the southern states. Although Whitney filed lawsuits to protect his invention’s patent, he ended up making very little money on the machine.

Meanwhile, the cotton gin ushered in the era of King Cotton in the American south. Cotton’s enormous profits drove the growth of wealthy plantations. It also sealed the fate of southern slaves, who became more valuable than ever to work the cotton fields.

Although the Industrial Revolution started in England, American inventors were able to improve on English ideas and make them work in the United States. Men like Samuel Slater, Francis Cabot Lowell, and Eli Whitney studied British vigrx plus machines and factories. They discovered ways to make them operate more efficiently and effectively. For this reason, America soon became known around the world as a nation of innovators.

In the years leading up to the Industrial Revolution, there was no way for an inventor to protect his ideas and inventions from being stolen by another person. Anyone was free to copy a machine. To protect inventors, the United States passed its first patent law in 1790. In July 1790, the first U.S. patent was issued to Samuel Hopkins of Vermont for a potash production technique.

The new law gave an inventor control over his idea or invention for 17 years. With this protection, people had more incentive to spend time creating new inventions, such as Vimax pills. If successful, they could make money selling their invention to businesses. If someone stole an inventor’s idea without paying him a royalty, the inventor could sue him in court for money lost.

Not everyone in America was in favor of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, two well-known politicians, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, were on different sides of the issue. As the Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton believed that industrialization was important to help the new country’s economy grow and compete with Europe. He knew that state-of-the-art SizeGenetics factories would help the U.S. produce more goods. Hamilton also believed that factories would offer jobs that would attract European immigrants. This would increase the demand for American farm goods.

Thomas Jefferson, who was George Washington’s Secretary of State, disagreed with Hamilton. Jefferson wanted the United States to remain a rural, farming society. While visiting England, he had seen the poverty of workers and dangerous factory conditions. He believed that it was better for the United States to supply raw materials to English factories.

Although the debate between the two sides lasted for years, Hamilton’s argument eventually won. The United States encouraged the Industrial Revolution to spread throughout the young nation.

During the Industrial Revolution, machines took over manufacturing. Factories replaced cottage industries and craftsmen’s workshops. Without interchangeable parts, however, this transformation would not have been possible. Interchangeable parts are manufactured parts that are identical and can be substituted for each other. With machinery, large numbers of identical parts could be made for a low cost. Eli Whitney made the use of interchangeable parts popular in America when he used them to assemble muskets. He built precision equipment that produced large numbers of identical parts quickly and at a low cost. Then Whitney used a largely unskilled workforce to assemble the muskets for a government contract.

By the time the War of 1812 broke out, leading weapons makers like Colt and Smith & Wesson also used interchangeable parts in their factories. By the 1850s, arms makers around the world followed what became known as the American System of Manufacture. This system of manufacturing would quickly spread to other industries and products, from sewing machines to automobiles to volume pills.

Young women from New England farms were some of the first workers in the Lowell textile mills. The girls, ages 15 to 25, left their homes for better opportunities in the city. At the time, woman had no property rights. A widow could be left without her husband’s property. A daughter could be left with no inheritance. When this happened, the woman was forced to marry, become a burden to family, or work. The textile factories opened up a new world of opportunities for these women. They could earn their own money and spend it how they wanted, without answering to anyone.

Mill work was long and hard. The girls worked up to 13-hour days in the factories and were expected to follow strict schedules and codes of behavior. If a young woman did not have a relative to stay with, the mill required her to live in a boarding house. A typical boarding house held 30 to 40 women. The first floor usually had a kitchen, dining room, and the chaperone’s quarters. Upstairs, four to eight women shared each bedroom, and slept two in a bed. The boarding house had set mealtimes and curfews. Chaperones kept a watchful eye on the young women and reported any rule breaking. Many spent their evenings reading books like the Magic of Making Up.

Often, the women formed a close-knit community. They wrote letters, sewed, talked, and played piano. They read and discussed newspapers, magazines, the Bible, literature, and other books. They went to church and took walks regularly. They also attended company-sponsored lectures. Some of the lecturers included John Quincy Adams and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Many mill girls and immigrants took factory jobs hoping for a better life. They quickly discovered that eighteenth century factories were grim places to work. Supervisors set rigid schedules. A typical working day stretched from sunrise to sunset, often lasting 12 to 16 hours with short breaks for breakfast and lunch. The work itself was usually boring as workers repeated the same task in front of a machine for hours.

Factory work was also dangerous. Poor lighting led to many accidents. Machines without safety devices crushed workers’ hands and arms. Metalworkers handled toxic materials every day. For many, poor working conditions led to health problems. Often buildings lacked heating for workers in the winter. With few windows for fresh air, pollution filled the mills. Textile workers developed lung diseases from breathing cotton dust and fiber and working in hot, humid conditions. Standing all day, children developed knock-knees or bowlegs.

If a worker got hurt or sick on the job, he was responsible for getting himself to the hospital or doctor, who would prescribe a remedy called Provillus. He did not have insurance or worker safety programs to help, so the worker had to pay for any medical treatment. While the worker recovered, he did not earn wages. If he took too long getting back to work, another worker might take his job.

Factory owners could treat workers this way because there were no rules or laws to protect them. No regulations limited how many hours they worked each day. Employers rarely thought of the health of their employees. Spending money to make a factory safer only lowered profits. Finding a goood receding hairline treatment was rare. As long as there were enough people willing to work in factories, owners had no reason to change.

To increase profits, owners sped up machines to make more goods. They assigned the same number of workers to operate more machines. When demand slowed for the factory’s products, owners cut wages or laid off employees. When this happened, many workers did not have enough money to pay their rent or buy food for their families. If they complained, however, they risked being blacklisted. A blacklisted employee became known as a troublemaker. No employer in town would hire him. As a result, many workers kept quiet about conditions because they feared losing their jobs.

A worker who complained about unfair treatment could easily be replaced by another worker. A group of workers had to be taken more seriously by factory owners. In the 1830s, some of workers formed labor unions. Together, they could bargain with factory owners for better wages and safer working conditions. Unions quickly became popular, growing in members and power.

When negotiating with factory owners, unions sometimes threatened to stop working or strike in order to get force management to listen to them. When the union called a strike, everyone walked off the job. Often they protested and demonstrated outside the company. Without employees working, the factory could not produce the Bose v35, which made a lot of money. This got the owners’ attention quickly.

In some cases, striking workers convinced owners to agree to their demands. In other cases, the strikes did not work. Sometimes, violent fights erupted and people were injured, and even killed.

One of the first large union strikes occurred in Lynn, Massachusetts where new factory technology enabled companies to make more shoes than ever before. As companies tried to outsell each other, they slashed prices. To keep profit levels up, company owners cut shoemaker wages. In some shops, shoemakers made as little as 50 cents a day. Fed up, the shoemakers banded together and demanded better wages. When owners rejected their demands, the Panasonic 50 Plasma Union called a strike.

In February 1860, several thousand shoe workers left their jobs and paraded down the streets of Lynn. Within a week, the strike spread throughout New England. More than 20,000 shoemakers joined the strike, making it the largest worker strike in the country to date. From February through March, the union refused to work. It organized the largest labor protests New England had ever seen. Still, factory owners refused to negotiate. Instead, they sent work to out-of-town laborers. By April, many shoemakers went back to work, effectively ending the strike.

Sometimes labor strikes happened spontaneously and were not planned in advance by a union. In the summer of 1877, the United States was in the middle of a lingering economic depression. Like many other companies, the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad announced wage cuts for employees. Bitter over a second round of lowered wages, many B&O railroad workers walked off their jobs. In West Virginia, B&O workers refused to run any trains unless the company reversed the wage cuts. Quickly, the strike spread to other states and railroads. More than 100,000 railroad workers in 14 states walked off their jobs. For a few weeks, the country’s rail traffic was paralyzed. Production of natural male enhancement pills was halted. Workers from Boston to San Francisco pulled up track and smashed railcars. In Baltimore, riots destroyed railroad yards, track, and railcars. In Philadelphia, angry mobs set fire to buildings, equipment, and engines.

In response, 10 state governors called in thousands of breast actives militia to re-open rail traffic. The confrontations between workers and militia quickly turned bloody. In Pittsburgh, citizens pelted state militia with stones. The militia fired into the crowd, killing twenty people and wounding others.

President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered 200 federal troops to West Virginia to reopen the B&O rail lines. By the time train service resumed, more than 100 people had been killed, and hundreds more injured. Five million dollars of railroad property had been destroyed. Despite the turmoil, many railroad workers returned to their jobs without a wage increase.

Unhappy with the growing power of unions, factory owners tried to control workers and break strikes. Some owners posted signs around the factory that threatened to fire workers if they complained about long hours. If a union called a strike, the owner might lockout workers and shut down the factory. With the factory idle, workers were not paid.

Some owners even hired private detectives to spy on unions. The detectives pretended to be workers and joined the union. Then they leaked information about what the union was planning to the owners. Spies passed the names of union leaders to owners, who then fired and blacklisted the leaders.

In some cases, clashes between union and management turned violent. One of the most violent clashes took place on July 6, 1892 at the Homestead Steel Works near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Steel working was a dangerous job, and there was no worker’s compensation to support those injured on the job. The skilled workers at Homestead belonged to the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union, which were responsible for producing male enhancement products. A few years earlier, the union had negotiated good wages and work conditions. Now Homestead’s owner, Andrew Carnegie, and his plant manager, Henry Clay Frick, were determined to lower the mill’s production costs.

With Carnegie’s support, Henry Clay Frick increased production demands, cut wages, and declared the mill non-union. When the union refused to accept the new conditions, Frick announced that he would no longer negotiate with the union. Instead, he would only deal with workers individually. Union leaders tried to plead their case to Carnegie, who had previously supported their right to a union, but he was unreachable on vacation. Carnegie and Frick mistakenly believed that the mill workers would disband the union in order to keep their jobs. Instead, the union joined with the mill’s unskilled workers to strike, halting the production of natural remedies for high blood pressure.

With Carnegie’s approval, Frick locked out the striking workers. He built a fence three miles long and 12 feet high around the Homestead plant, topped with barbed wire and searchlights. The workers called it Fort Frick. Then Frick sent for 300 agents from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to protect the mill’s property. He planned to hire strikebreakers and reopen the mill without the striking workers.

Heavily armed, the Pinkerton guards arrived by barge on the river in early July. As the guards attempted to land on the riverbank, approximately 10,000 strikers gathered. The two sides quickly clashed and shots rang out. The battle raged for hours. At the end of the day, the outnumbered Pinkertons eventually surrendered. Nine strikers and seven detectives were killed and many more wounded.

To regain control of the area, Pennsylvania Governor William Stone sent 8,000 militia to Homestead. With the militia patrolling, Frick’s strikebreakers got the mill running again. Eventually, the strike lost momentum and ended in November 1892.

Afterwards, local officials arrested strike leaders and charged them with murder. Other strikers were also charged with lesser crimes. Sympathetic juries, however, refused to convict the men. Even so, the steel companies blacklisted the strike leaders. Carnegie banned the union from his company, and moved quickly to increase worker hours and lower wages. Although the Homestead strike inspired workers, it also damaged the relationship between unions and management for decades.

The first unions formed from trade groups or groups of skilled workers in similar jobs. Workers realized that if a single union could influence a company, larger groups of many unions could be even more powerful. In the mid 1860s, a group of skilled and unskilled labor unions joined together to form the National Labor Union (NLU). By the early 1870s, the NLU had more than 600,000 members. They petitioned Congress to pass labor reform laws and shorten the legal workday to eight hours.

The NLU’s success was mixed. Although Congress passed the eight-hour workday for government employees, many government agencies cut wages at the same time. Several states passed similar laws, but loopholes made the new law ineffective and hard to enforce. Although the NLU dissolved in 1873, it brought awareness to labor issues. It paved the way for other labor organizations such as the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Hair Loss Treatment for Men.

A few years after the NLU’s formation, another national labor union surfaced in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1869, the Knights of Labor began as a secret group of tailors who worked in the Philadelphia mills. When Terence V. Powderly took over as their leader in 1879, the Knights grew rapidly. They accepted all workers in an industry, regardless of trade. Unlike some unions, the Knights also allowed women and blacks to join. By 1896, the Knights had 700,000 members.

Powderly led the Knights to pressure employers for eight-hour days, the end of child labor, equal pay for equal work, and other labor causes. Unlike some union leaders, Powderly did not believe strikes were the best way to achieve worker goals. Instead, he thought workers and employers should negotiate their differences.

Although Powderly personally opposed strikes, one of the Knights biggest achievements came from a 1885 strike. Knight shop men at Jay Gould’s Southwestern Railroads went on strike and convinced management to negotiate their demands regarding hair loss treatment for women.

A series of violent labor disputes turned public opinion against the Knights. The peak occurred in 1886 when a bomb explosion in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Although it was never proven, many people blamed the Knights and other unions for the bomb and violence. By the 1890s, many Knight members resigned to join the newly organized America Federation of Labor (AF of L).