power loom

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

It was not the gig mill alone, nor the wide frames or power looms—it was the specific mode of domination over workers that the factory created that they felt such deep trepidation and anger toward. “It is an oversimplification to ascribe the cause of the debasement of the weavers’ conditions to the power-loom,” E. P. Thompson wrote, or any of the other automated technologies. “The status of the weavers had been shattered by 1813, at a time when the total number of power-looms in the UK was estimated at 2,400, and when the competition of power with hand was largely psychological.” In other words, there were comparatively few power looms in existence when they became a lightning rod for revolt; in large part because they constituted the crucial inner guts of the factory, which was the true source of degradation.

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Nottingham knitters rioted against wide frames and cut-ups, West Riding croppers eyed the shearing frame and the gig mill, and the Lancashire weavers had in their sights Edmund Cartwright’s power loom. It had taken a decade or two, and had required some further innovation and adjustments to make it profitable, but Cartwright’s device had finally caught on. In Manchester, the looms were often gathered in a factory powered by the steam engine, too. There were not yet a large number of power looms in operation, but, as in the other Midland and Yorkshire regions, trade was depressed, poverty was rampant, and families were suffering. Any entrepreneur who sought to install a steam-power loom, or who already had one in operation, now faced the wrath of thousands of cotton weavers.

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They showed us whose blood runs in the machines that move the world. PRELUDE Power Looms 1786 Edmund Cartwright It was a simple conviction that set everything in motion, to hear the inventor tell the story. Edmund Cartwright had come to believe that any work a human did with a tool, a machine could do too, with the right upgrades and a dependable power source. Even, say, the act of weaving cloth on a loom—the work carried out by hundreds of thousands of England’s skilled artisans. Yet when Cartwright championed the idea of a power loom one night at a dinner gathering, his companions scoffed at the notion.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

Even when technologies are replacing for some but augmenting for others, workers might suffer hardships. In recent years, the creation of new jobs for robotics engineers has provided little relief to those who lost their jobs to industrial robots on the assembly lines. The arrival of the power loom, in similar fashion, replaced the jobs of hand-loom weavers, while creating new jobs for power-loom weavers. But while hand-loom weavers’ incomes diminished almost immediately, it took decades for the wages of power-loom weavers to rise, as they had to acquire new skills and a new labor market had to develop for those skills.36 Because replacing technological progress often comes with what Schumpeter called a “perennial gale of creative destruction,” there are always winners and losers.37 The overwhelming focus of popular commentary on unanswerable questions like whether there will be enough jobs in 2050 is unfortunate.

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Cartwright successfully petitioned Parliament for a grant in 1809, making the case that his machines were of great importance to Britain’s competitiveness in trade.18 There can be no doubt that the power loom was a significant invention. As power looms improved over the course of the nineteenth century, so did productivity: the economic historian James Bessen has calculated that in 1800 it took a hand-loom weaver using a single loom nearly forty minutes to produce a yard of coarse cloth, while in 1902 a weaver could produce the same amount in less than a minute, operating eighteen automatic power looms.19 But it did so at the expense of the hand-loom weavers it replaced. We shall return to the fate of the hand-loom weaver in chapter 5.

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Skeptics have pointed out that evidence on the evolution of the skill premium, as economists call it, is sparse for the nineteenth century.84 One study has found that there was no return on human capital, but this is no surprise since it focused on the return on old skills in construction, which were not affected by mechanization.85 However, mechanization required new skills, which were eventually reflected in workers’ wages. In the American context, James Bessen has traced the wage trajectories of factory weavers over the course of the nineteenth century, as the power loom and steam came into use. Similar to the macroeconomic trends in wages in Britain, growth in the wages of factory weavers in America followed mechanization only after a delay of several decades. The reason, Bessen argues, is simple: power-loom weavers needed new skills that took time to acquire, and their skills took even longer to be reflected in their wages. Because the new technologies were initially not standardized across factories, which often used different types of looms, the skills of the weavers were not of much use in factories other than the one in which they worked.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
by Joshua B. Freeman
Published 27 Feb 2018

The boosts in productivity were startling: the earliest jennies increased output per worker sixfold or more, while Arkwright’s equipment, once perfected, proved several hundredfold more efficient. In the late eighteenth century, the first power looms for weaving were introduced, mechanizing the next step in textile production. The early looms had many problems and could produce only low-quality fabric. As a result, hand-weaving remained dominant in cotton production until the 1820s and even later in worsted and wool. But with incremental improvements, power looms gradually became the norm in virtually all forms of weaving.19 Arkwright’s Nottingham mill employed three hundred workers, about the same number as the Lombes’.

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A wealthy Boston merchant, Lowell, during an extended sojourn in Britain, decided that big profits could be made through the large-scale integrated production of textiles, using powered equipment for all phases of the operation within a single factory. At the time, few British firms spun and wove in the same plant and no power loom had ever been used in the United States, because of Britain’s technology embargo. On returning home, Lowell hired a skilled mechanic, Paul Moody, to help him build machinery modeled after what he had seen in England. By 1814, they had a power loom successfully operating and a dressing machine to prepare the warp.9 Meanwhile, Lowell formed a joint-stock company, the Boston Manufacturing Company, with other Boston merchants to build and operate a mill.

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Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 66; Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 24–25; “National Register of Historical Places Inventory—Nomination Form,” Boston Manufacturing Company. 14.While the first mill established the basic framework for production, the second mill established the physical template for future mills. Candee, “Architecture and Corporate Planning in the Early Waltham System,” 29, 34; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 14. 15.Batchelder, Introduction and Early Progress of the Cotton Manufacture, 81; Dalzell, Jr., Enterprising Elite, 30–31, 50; Appleton, Introduction of the Power Loom, 9; Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 83; Laurence Gross, The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Mass., 1835–1955 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 12; Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 59; Betsy Hunter Bradley, The Works: The Industrial Architecture of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93. 16.Ware, Early New England Cotton Manufacture, 63, 139, 145, 184; Gross, Course of Industrial Decline, 6–7, 229. 17.Recent accounts that stress the global nature of the cotton industry include Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Beckert, Empire of Cotton.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History
by Sven Beckert
Published 2 Dec 2014

With new machines and an abundant supply of thread, this was a golden age for weavers all over the Lancashire and Cheshire countryside, as tens of thousands of cottagers spent endless hours on their looms working up the rapidly increasing output of British spinning factories. While Edmund Cartwright had patented a water-powered loom as early as 1785, productivity improvements in weaving at first proved modest, and technical problems with power looms great.14 Britain’s growing class of manufacturers, despite issues with looms, were acutely aware that these new machines allowed them to increasingly dominate the one node in the global cotton complex whose control had eluded them: manufacturing.

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In the years between 1860 and 1920 mechanical spindles in the world’s cotton industry tripled, as entrepreneurs and workers set another 100 million spindles in motion—half of them in the forty years before 1900, and the other half in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The spread of power looms was dramatic as well. In 1860 there were 650,000 power looms; the number reached 3.2 million by 1929. Continental Europe slowly increased its share of global cotton spindles between 1860 and 1900 rising from a quarter of the total in 1860 to 30 percent at the turn of the century. America also increased its share at the expense of Britain, rising from a 10 percent share in 1860 to around 20 percent in 1900.4 The primary effect of this shift was to give a much larger number of states and capitalists an interest in cheap cotton, and thus in the transformation of the global countryside, hoping to draw an ever wider swath of the world’s hinterland into the circuits of metropolitan capital accumulation.5 The Cotton Empire After Slavery, 1865–1920 That the demand for raw cotton exploded just when the traditional way of organizing its production—slavery—had collapsed gave increased urgency to capitalists’ and government bureaucrats’ efforts to mobilize cotton-growing workers.

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Cotton manufacturer Henry Ashworth added superlatives of his own, celebrating “a degree of prosperity in business which has probably been unequalled in any previous time.”1 These self-satisfied cotton manufacturers and merchants had reason to be smug: They stood at the center of a world-spanning empire—the empire of cotton. They ruled over factories in which tens of thousands of workers operated huge spinning machines and noisy power looms. They acquired cotton from the slave plantations of the Americas and sold the products of their mills to markets in the most distant corners of the world. The cotton men debated the affairs of the world with surprising nonchalance, even though their own occupations were almost banal—making and hawking cotton thread and cloth.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets
by Andy Kessler
Published 13 Jun 2005

He knew that cotton mills would then be built, which would turn out an abundance of thread and yarn. Cartwright thought about starting his own cotton mill but figured, smartly, that everyone and his brother would start one of those. Instead, he wanted to leverage the abundance of yarn, not help create it. So he began working on a Power Loom. He was only two hundred years ahead of his time in innovative business thinking. The world would eventually catch up. Without even looking at a hand-operated loom, he built a fully mechanical one and patented it in 1785. It was worthless. But he persisted and eventually he fully emulated the hand and foot movements of weavers with mechanics.

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He tried to use a waterwheel to operate the weaving mill, but quickly contacted Boulton and Watt and hooked up a steam engine. An experienced hand weaver could, according to Richard Guest’s, Compendious History of the Cotton Manufacture 1823, produce “two pieces of nine-eighths shirting per week; each twentyfour yards long, and containing 105 shoots of weft in an inch.” A 34 HOW WE GOT HERE young kid overseeing a Power Loom, run by coal and steam, could produce one each day. That’s 3.5 times productivity. As you can imagine, the mechanization of cloth making from start to finish brought the cost down considerably. This also meant a huge increase in demand for raw cotton. *** Despite an annoying interruption of the American War of Independence, the Revolutionary War, or as it was known in England, the War with Those Damn Colonists, the Triangle Trade picked up steam.

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. *** Despite an annoying interruption of the American War of Independence, the Revolutionary War, or as it was known in England, the War with Those Damn Colonists, the Triangle Trade picked up steam. Finished materials to the coast of Africa, traded for unfortunate slaves who were transported to sugar and tobacco and cotton plantations, and traded for the raw materials needed as inputs to the new Industrial economy. Cotton was hot. Operators of Spinning Frames and Power Looms were demanding more and more raw cotton from the New World. The long staple variety of cotton was brought from the West Indies to Georgia and South Carolina. The good news was that its seeds were really easy to remove from the “cotton boll.” The bad news was that it needed a long growing season and humidity and so only grew in coastal regions.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

But before that happens, all of us humans will be living in computer-world; I don’t mean a simulation – though that could easily be true already – I mean societies inseparable from, and dependent on, our interface with AI. * * * We need to learn from the past. That is what the past is for. * * * So, let’s take a trip back to where the future began. In Britain. Steam power. The steam-powered loom. * * * Spinning and weaving are two of the oldest skills in human history – going back in time at least 12,000 years. Humans need clothes and coverings. What changed the way we made those goods was automation. * * * Britain in the 1700s was all about wool. Think sheep. Where I come from, in Lancashire, sheep used to be known as white gold.

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After thousands of years of women and men spinning by hand, James Hargreaves’ Spinning Jenny (1764) and Samuel Crompton’s Spinning Mule (1779) had the process of spinning a pound of yarn down from 40 hours to 3 hours – and it was soon cut to 90 minutes. Then in 1785 Edmund Cartwright did for weaving what the other boys had done for spinning. The power loom went into the new factories and by the turn of the century the great age of industrialisation had begun. * * * The Industrial Revolution was a practical revolution. Humans reworked everything we had learned over millennia of trial and error – clothing, manufacture, transport, heating, lighting, weaponry, medicine, construction.

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Smaller takes a while to get into the picture because smaller isn’t important until the 1950s electronics revolution that is transistors. For the 19th century the slogan is: Bigger is Better (top hats, crinolines, chimneys, iron bridges, engines, ships, cannon, and factories of course. Vast, non-human in scale. The machine as monster – prefigured by Frankenstein). The steam-engine had no precedent. The mule and the power-loom entered on no prepared heritage. They sprang into existence like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter. Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire, W. Cooke Taylor, 1842 By 1860 Britain was still the only fully industrialised economy in the world, producing HALF of the world’s iron and textiles (just dwell on that for a second)

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig
Published 15 Mar 2020

Whereas spinning had been mechanised in factories, weavers were primarily using a handloom which was operated on a domestic basis up until after the Napoleonic wars; in other words, they still owned their means of production. Wages in weaving were very high, as it was a skilled craft. It was not until the early 1840s that the number of power looms in production exceeded the number of handloom weavers. The introduction of the power loom had three primary results: it concentrated the weaving aspect of cotton production in the factories, it led to the displacement of the handloom weavers, and it destroyed the wages they had received. The displacement of labour from the spread of power looms brought down the wages of the handloom weavers from 23 ­shillings a week in 1800 to 6 shillings a week in 1830. Nassau Senior advised them 14 In his Theory of Wages, 1932. 2 The Future of Work 19 to ‘get out of that branch of production’.

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In fact, Ricardo anticipates Lionel Robbins’s famous definition of economics as the science that studies human behaviour as a ‘relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’.5 However, by the third edition of his Principles in 1821, Ricardo had somewhat changed his tune. The interval had seen the most intense period of the Luddite disorders. The Luddites, as is well known, were groups of English weavers who destroyed factory machinery—wide knitting frames and power looms—in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. They were eventually put down by the military, and their leaders hung or transported to Australia, despite Lord Byron making an eloquent speech in their defence in the House of Lords. Scientific economic theory held the Luddite argument to be economically illiterate.

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Nassau Senior advised them 14 In his Theory of Wages, 1932. 2 The Future of Work 19 to ‘get out of that branch of production’. They did: 240,000 handloom jobs disappeared between 1829 and 1860 as power looms surged ahead. What about the larger picture? Between 1800 and 1915, the population in Europe (minus the Russian empire) grew from 152 million to 315 million. Between 1890 and 1915 (the period of maximum emigration), about 40 million people left Europe for the lightly populated New World. Had this vent for surplus population not existed, Europe might well have experienced some population redundancy in the nineteenth century.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

Machinery had been introduced because labour costs were high, whereas elsewhere in Europe labour costs were low and so did not justify the substantial capital outlay needed to install the new machines. By 1829 there were 55,000 power looms in England; five years later their number had almost doubled, to 100,000. Power looms gradually drove handlooms out of business. In 1820 there were 240,000 handloom weavers in Britain. Increasing demand could still not be entirely satisfied by power looms. But the handloom weavers were becoming increasingly impoverished. Mechanization was driving down prices for the average piece of printed cotton: 3 shillings and 7 pence in 1818, 2 shillings and 11 pence in 1824, just over 2 shillings by the end of the decade.

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After the war with France ended in 1815, the export of cotton to the Continent became possible again, and soon it was conquering one country after another as entrepreneurs saw the advantages of the new material and the new techniques. Not surprisingly, after the war was over, the textile industry grew very rapidly once more in northern France. The first spinning machine was set up in Reims in 1815, while in Roubaix the woollen industry introduced the first power loom in 1844. Power-loom weaving began further east, with the installation of a steam-driven cotton mill in Elberfeld in 1821; by 1834 there were ten engines in the Wupper valley. The spread of the new industrial production across Europe was as uneven as its driving forces were diverse. The Spanish textile industry increased only very slowly in the first decades of the century; although there were fourteen water-powered textile mills in 1808, this number had only grown to thirty-six by 1836.

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Nineteenth-century society increased its power over nature: governments gained the power to avert or alleviate hunger and natural disasters such as fires and floods; medical researchers reached out in their laboratories for power over disease; engineers and planners channelled rivers, drained marshes, drove out wild animals and levelled forests, they built towns and cities, railway and sewer networks, ships and bridges, to extend humankind’s power over the natural world; and in a different sense, scientists and mechanics devised and exploited new sources of power, from steam to electricity, from the power loom to the internal combustion engine. Power could be formal or informal, it could be exercised through violence or persuasion, it could be consensual or majoritarian, it might take economic, social, cultural, political, religious, organizational or a host of other forms. But as the nineteenth century progressed, people increasingly prioritized power over glory, honour and comparable values that had been dominant through most centuries before 1815.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

Why do we still teach schoolchildren to sing his ballad? Anxiety about machines encroaching on the work of people runs deep. Some sixty years before the Great Bend Tunnel, the Luddites (possibly named after an early machine smasher, Ned Ludd) reacted more destructively to the stocking frames, spinning frames, and power looms that were making textile workers redundant. Some eighty years after John Henry, in 1955, Ford Motor Company workers rose up against unprecedented automation of the assembly lines in Brook Park, Ohio. Their wildcat strikes were blessed by local union leader Alfred Granakis, who called the automation of manufacturing an “economic Frankenstein.”

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First, machines relieved humans of work that was manually exhausting and mentally enervating. This was the story of the late industrial revolution, which, having pulled all those workers off farms and into factories, proceeded to make most of them unnecessary with contraptions like the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, and the power loom. And it’s a process that continues around the world. Consider Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturing subcontractor to global electronics brands like Apple. Starting in 2011, it started putting robots on the lines to perform welding, polishing, and such tasks—ten thousand of them that first year. In 2013, Chairman Terry Gou noted at Foxconn’s annual meeting that the firm now employed over a million people.

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In the industrial revolution, mechanics and technicians invented or improved industrial machinery to make textile mills more effective. For example, Paul Moody, a weaver and mechanic who worked in the Massachusetts textile industry in the early nineteenth century, had no compunctions about stepping into that form of technology. He co-invented the power loom, invented the filling frame, improved the “double speeder,” and improved upon the mechanism for powering the machinery. Instead of having his weaving skills be automated by these machines, he invented and optimized new technical capabilities. His industrialist boss, Francis Cabot Lowell, got most of the credit (and had a mill town in Massachusetts named after him), but it was Paul Moody who made these new approaches to work successful.1 Professor James Bessen of Boston University notes in his book Learning by Doing that progress in the textile industry of the time—the Silicon Valley of its day—was not just a function of new, more automated textile technologies.

Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution
by Emma Griffin
Published 10 Jun 2013

Here is Toynbee describing the advent of industrialisation: We now approach a darker period – a period as disastrous and as terrible as any through which a nation ever passed; disastrous and terrible because side by side with a great increase of wealth was seen an enormous increase of pauperism [and] the degradation of a large body of producers . . . The steam-­engine, the spinning-­jenny, the power-­loom had torn up the population by the roots . . . The effects of the Industrial Revolution prove that free competition may produce wealth without producing well-­being.40 Toynbee ushered the expression ‘industrial revolution’ into the English language, and his social interpretation of that newly named event continued to inform opinion through much of the twentieth century.

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All those involved in the knitting industry encountered the same difficulty, one moment enjoying the boom times the next plunged into poverty when demand for their goods fell sharply and rapidly away.78 Most retained some footing on the land for no other reason than to cushion their fall during the hardest times. So here is the context in which we should situate the long-­term pressures on the handloom and knitting industries that resulted from the spread of mechanisation. By the 1820s, new ‘power looms’ were beginning to rival handlooms in the quality and quantity of cloth they could weave. As the machines were refined and improved they became ever more attractive to manufacturers. Inevitably, the growth of factory-­based weaving in the 1830s and 1840s had serious ramifications for those who continued to weave on a small scale in their own home.79 Most of the autobiographers born in the nineteenth century at some point abandoned their attempts to earn a livelihood from the handloom industry.

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If every mention is noted, then about 80 per cent of women’s work falls into in just five areas: textiles, agriculture, domestic 4017.indd 86 25/01/13 8:21 PM women, work and the cares of home 87 service, retailing and needlework. Each area encompassed a variety of different tasks. Cloth manufacture, for example, ranged from spinning on the humble spinning wheel to working as a skilled weaver on a handloom, to operating a vast power loom in a factory. Domestic service might refer to a lady’s maid in an aristocratic household or to a woman going out to char for a neighbour only marginally better off than herself. But with so much women’s work shoehorned into just five areas of the economy and with so little change over the period, it is clear at the outset that women were experiencing the industrial revolution in very different ways to their husbands and children.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin
Published 10 Jan 2019

And a widespread sense of injustice and outrage were certainly a big part of the 2016 upheavals that produced the election of Donald Trump and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. This is standard. UNFAIRNESS PUTS THE “RAGE” IN OUTRAGE The classic example, as we saw, was the Luddite Riots in the early 1800s. Competition from “power looms” led to rapid job displacement, but it wasn’t just the job losses that riled up people. Workers saw the power looms as outrageously unjust since they allowed skilled craftsmen with families to look after to be replaced by untrained children who were paid a pittance. This violated long-standing practices. Having seen one set of social norms ignored by the mill owners, the protesting workers felt justified in violating another set of social norms.

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The Napoleonic Wars had depressed the textile business, and poor harvests had generated high food prices and the occasional food riot. New, unsettling ideas from the 1789 French Revolution had drifted into northern England and were getting a hearing—things like human rights, government for and by the governed, and anti-monarchy sentiment. Automation was thrown into this volatile mix in the form of the Cartwright power loom. It allowed an unskilled child to produce cloth three and half times faster than a skilled weaver using traditional technology. Weaver wages plummeted. Tens of thousands of weavers petitioned Parliament for a minimum wage—and were refused. Soldiers forcibly dispersed workers protesting for higher pay in Nottingham, and in reaction, the workers raided a nearby mill and hammered to pieces one of the new looms.

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“Since it first came onto our streets, Uber has broken the law, exploited its drivers and refused to take responsibility for the safety of passengers.”13 Uber is neither a white-collar robot nor a telemigrant, but it turned taxis from a sheltered sector to an open sector—just as globots are doing in many service sectors. And, like power looms in northern England in 1811, the technology seemed outrageously unfair. Skilled workers saw their occupations suddenly opened to competition from less qualified, less regulated workers. The go-slow protest is a classic example of how workers will react when their livelihoods and communities are threatened by technology (or globalization), especially when the changes are viewed as unjust.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

Technologies premised on steam and mechanical automation were ripping up the rules of production, labor, value, wealth, capability, and power. What we’ve come to call the First Industrial Revolution was in full swing, mill by mill changing the country and the world. In 1785, the inventor Edmund Cartwright debuted the power loom, a new mechanized means of weaving. At first it didn’t catch on. Soon, though, further iterations revolutionized textile manufacturing. Not everyone was happy. The power loom could be operated by a single child, producing as much fabric as three and a half traditional weavers. Mechanization meant that weavers’ wages were more than halved in the forty-five years after 1770 even as the price of basic foodstuffs leapt.

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In the past, new technologies put people out of work, producing what the economist John Maynard Keynes called “technological unemployment.” In Keynes’s view, this was a good thing, with increasing productivity freeing up time for further innovation and leisure. Examples of tech-related displacement are myriad. The introduction of power looms put old-fashioned weavers out of business; motorcars meant that carriage makers and horse stables were no longer needed; lightbulb factories did great as candlemakers went bust. Broadly speaking, when technology damaged old jobs and industries, it also produced new ones. Over time these new jobs tended toward service industry roles and cognitive-based white-collar jobs.

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Instead, technology was created, capital funded it, and everyone else got on board, whatever the long-term consequences. This time containment must rewrite that story. There might not yet be a global “we,” but there is a group of people who are building this technology right now. We bear a huge weight of responsibility to ensure that the adaptation does not go one way. That, unlike power looms, unlike the climate, the coming wave is adapted to human needs, is built around human concerns. The coming wave should not be created to serve distant interests, following an agenda of blind techno-logic—or worse. Too many visions of the future start with what technology can or might do and work from there.

Running Money
by Andy Kessler
Published 4 Jun 2007

Cartwright 66 Running Money thought for a moment about starting his own cotton mill, but his business instincts kicked in, and he moved up the value chain. He wanted to leverage the abundance of yarn, not help to create more. Instead of contributing to the falling price of yarn, he thought about what he could do with cheaper thread. Then he worked on the missing piece of the puzzle: a mechanical power loom. Without even looking at a hand-operated loom, he built a fully mechanical one. It didn’t work, but that didn’t stop Cartwright from getting a patent in 1785 for his mechanical loom. He persisted in the shop, and eventually his loom fully emulated the hand and foot movements of weavers with hand-operated equipment.

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Cartwright opened a weaving mill in 1787 in Doncaster, with workers simply feeding in or fixing broken thread. He tried to use a waterwheel to operate the mill, but it barely budged his machine. He quickly contacted Boulton and Watt and hooked up their steam engine. Cheap power helped create a new market that didn’t exist previously. My sense is that Cartwright built his power looms assuming he could get enough power applied to them—which of course was a huge mistake. He didn’t worry about power until it was a problem and then lucked out that Boulton and Watt had already licked it. Boulton and Watt had brought down the cost of power, probably by a factor of 10, or about 5% per year.

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Boulton and Watt had brought down the cost of power, probably by a factor of 10, or about 5% per year. Lucky for him, and lucky for Boulton and Watt. Not much different from the first Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets operating at a crawl on the first IBM PCs, driving demand for faster and faster 286 and 386 microprocessors from Intel. Cotton was hot. Operators of Spinning Frames and power looms were demanding more and more raw cotton from the New World. The hands that were missing were not weaving hands but hands to pick cotton. Unfortunately, Africans pressed into slavery met that demand, accelerating the Triangle Trade. Finished goods out of England were provided to slave traders on the coast of Africa.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

The significance of this fact for industrialization21 was twofold, and instructive. The initial impact of Kay’s invention was an increase in the productivity of Britain’s weavers—enough of an increase that they were able to weave all the yarn that they could get in less time than ever before. And they could do it by hand. Though power looms had existed, at least in concept, for centuries (under his sketch for one, Leonardo himself wrote, “This is second only to the printing press22 in importance; no less useful in its practical application; a lucrative, beautiful, and subtle invention”), there was little interest in them so long as virtually all the available yarn could be turned into cloth in cottages.

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At one union meeting, a spinner argued violently against allowing “piecers” (the subordinates on the spinning line, who tie together threads when they break) to actually put up a cop of cotton yarn unless he was “a son, brother, or orphan nephew.”51 In the industry’s Lancashire heartland,52 mule spinners developed work rules in 1780 that remained in force until the 1960s, and partly in consequence, the new and improved ring-spinning machines, invented by the American John Thorp in 1828, which operated continuously and twisted fibers into yarn by attaching them to a rotating ring, didn’t catch on in Britain53 until the end of the nineteenth century. As with spinning, so with weaving. Edmund Cartwright, a onetime Church of England minister and “the last of the great inventors54 who belong to the craft period,” built the first power loom in 1785, inspired by the need to keep up with the great surpluses of yarn being produced by Arkwright’s factories.* As Cartwright later recalled, as soon as Arkwright’s patent expired,55 so many mills would be erected and so much cotton spun that hands would never be found to weave it…. It struck me that as plain weaving can only be three movements which were to follow each other in succession, there would be little difficulty in producing them and repeating them.

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By summertime, only a few dozen had been built and installed, but that was enough to provoke Manchester’s weavers, who accurately saw the threat they represented. Whether their anger flamed hot enough to burn down Grimshaw’s mill remains unknown, but something certainly did: In March 1792, after a series of anonymous threats, the mill was destroyed. Cartwright’s power looms were not the first textile machines to be attacked, and they would not be the last. SIR ISAAC NEWTON’S THIRD law of motion states that every action is paired with an equal and opposite reaction. The “equal and opposite” reaction to the industrialization of the textile industry—and, by extension, all industrialization—is widely, though vaguely, known as Luddism.

Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (And How It Got That Way)
by Rachel Slade
Published 9 Jan 2024

Lowell was already a wealthy merchant in 1810 when he traveled to England posing as an American bumpkin, which aligned nicely with British views of the former colonists. Feigning ignorance, Lowell talked his way into textile factories, where he used his photographic memory to record the inner workings of power looms. As soon as he got back to Boston, he drew up what he remembered of the machinery. He didn’t quite get the whole story, but aided by English, Welsh, and Scottish mechanics, Lowell and several other investors successfully built America’s first fully integrated cotton mill in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814, powered by the Charles River.

…

Using a pair of brushes with long, stiff teeth, family members would spend long days carding the wool, drawing the fluff back and forth between the bristles to get the fibers running in the same direction while removing bits of plant and small stones caught in the animal’s hair. The carded wool was then spun by hand into a continuous length of yarn and wound onto a spool. Using foot-powered looms, townspeople wove the yarn into a twill fabric. The fabric was then napped—roughed up with combs to create a thicker, warmer surface. Using shears, they would closely trim and clean the fabric. That last step, called scouring, required heavy-duty chemicals to rid the fabric of its natural oils, dirt, and insects.

…

They occasionally peered over their thick lenses to study Ben and Whitney while keeping up a conversation that had been going on for decades. Whitney observed the old canvas rolling carts that once moved raw wool and woven textiles from looms to the fullers, where the fabric was beaten, and to finishers, where it was napped and snipped. She surveyed the unused power looms idle in the dim light, covered in cobwebs and dust. Surrounded by the materials of the manufacturing age, Whitney felt something inside spark to life. She had a visceral sense of the industrious people who once created textiles here, their dreams for themselves and their children. Whitney’s thoughts wandered to her family’s agricultural roots.

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI
by John Cassidy
Published 12 May 2025

There was sporadic violence, but nothing on a large scale until March 1812, a month before the attack on Rawfolds Mill, when, in Stockport, a town just east of Manchester, unknown attackers set alight a factory-cum-warehouse whose owner, William Radcliffe, had introduced power looms.29 The following month a crowd of thousands attacked a mill containing power looms at Middleton, just north of Manchester. “Vollies of stones were thrown, and the windows smashed to atoms; the internal part of the building being guarded, a musket was discharged in the hope of intimidating and dispersing the assailants,” the Manchester Gazette reported.30 “In a very short time the effects were too shockingly seen in the death of three, and it is said, about ten wounded.”

…

In 1785 Edmund Cartwright, an inventor from Nottinghamshire who was also a cleric, patented a crude weaving machine, or loom, that could be powered by water or steam. Cartwright worked to improve his invention, obtaining a final patent in 1792. The new machine didn’t take off immediately—it wasn’t easy to use and required more tinkering—but during the early nineteenth century, some Lancashire mill owners started to employ power looms in significant numbers. This development, together with a slump in the global demand for textiles during the Napoleonic Wars, caused weavers’ incomes to fall sharply. According to one estimate, between 1804 and 1810 their wages fell by more than 40 percent.28 Initially, the weavers reacted to this hardship peacefully.

…

In the ensuing violence, at least seven more people were killed.31 The Luddite protests fused with more generalized discontent about the depressed wartime economy and the rising cost of living, which was driving many workers to near starvation. During the spring and summer of 1812, food riots broke out in towns and cities across northern England, including Leeds, Sheffield, and Carlisle. In the middle of April, a Stockport mill that used power looms was burned down, and a second mill, which used new machines to dress the woven yarn, was threatened. Its owner, Thomas Garside, received an anonymous letter, signed “General Justice,” that threatened to burn down his factory if he didn’t remove the new machinery. “Remember We have given you fare Warning and if your factory is Burn, it is your own fault,” the letter said.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby
Published 22 Dec 2009

Edmund Cartwright, a country clergyman and graduate of Oxford, became absorbed with the weaving process after visiting a cotton spinning mill. A year later, in 1785, he patented a power loom that used steam power to operate a regular loom for making cloth. It became the prototype of the modern loom. Although Cartwright built a weaving mill, he went bankrupt. Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, which, as the name suggests, combined two inventions, the spinning jenny and the power loom. He had to sell the rights to his mule because he was too poor to pay for the patenting process. Steam power gave the British the competitive edge in textile making, particularly cotton.

…

Its fibers were easier to work with than those of wool, silk, or flax, and its market was huge. The goal was to mechanize the movements made by the hands and arms of the spinners and weavers. Four men, working independently, transformed textile making with their inventions of the spinning jenny, the spinning mule, and the power loom, all designed to speed up the process of turning wool into thread and thread into cloth. Their differing success epitomizes the mixed fate of inventors. Both James Hargreaves and Thomas Arkwright came up with the spinning jenny, a simple device that multiplied the spindles of yarn spun by one wheel.

…

He could also astound as when at age eighty he responded to the panic of 1873 by buying up those companies on the ropes to broaden his railroad empire. And then there was the 260-foot-long yacht with its grand staircase and ten elegantly-furnished staterooms to give authentic glitter to the name “Gilded Era.”2 Carnegie and Rockefeller were also self-made millionaires. The arrival of steam-powered looms had destroyed the livelihood of Carnegie’s father and prompted his mother to scrape together enough savings from her shop to move her family from Scotland to the sooty shores of the Monongahela River. Carnegie’s stunning proficiency as a telegraph operator smoothed an upward path in the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, whence he became a venture capitalist dealing in railroads, bridges, and oil derricks.

Worn: A People's History of Clothing
by Sofi Thanhauser
Published 25 Jan 2022

The motion of the shuttle creates the selvedge, in the multitudinous moments when the weft thread reaches the edge, and turns around. The power loom, which was first used in the late eighteenth century, is essentially a handloom with a motor strapped on. It throws a wooden shuttle back and forth carrying a little supply of thread wound on a quill. Then, in the 1960s, a Swiss company called Sulzer developed a machine that did away with the shuttle. Instead of using one continuous weft, the Sulzer loom shot individual threads across, one by one, using pneumatic pressure. The wider, shuttle-less loom ran much faster and with fewer technical challenges than the clattering cast iron power looms. Only one thing was lost when the Swiss looms were adopted by manufacturers: the selvedge.

…

He hired a clockmaker, also named John Kay, to build a spinning machine using Lewis Paul’s two-speed rollers, patented the machine himself, and gathered the investors necessary to build the first spinning mill on the River Derwent in Derbyshire in 1771. This mill was the first factory as we now conceive of them. Machines that could weave this thread into cloth followed soon after, beginning with Edmund Cartwright’s invention of the power loom in 1784. Mechanization raised productivity 370 times, with the effect that labor costs in England dropped below India’s. The price of British-made cloth also fell. A length of muslin that had cost 116 shillings in the early 1780s cost 28 shillings fifty years later. Extraordinary social mobility occurred for some cotton mill owners in England who had begun as tinkerers or mechanics.

…

These textile mills introduced the colonial government into the economy in new ways. It granted industrial licensing, arbitrated in labor disputes, and controlled exports. In these capacities, the state intervened to ensure that Coimbatore’s spinning mills provided thread to local handloom weavers rather than weaving it themselves on power looms, as did the “composite” mills of Bombay. It was a gesture toward maintaining a traditional vocation, but nearly a century later, Coimbatore was clearly defined more by its industrial output than its hand weavers. A few days before our arrival the monsoon had set, tempering the pitiless June heat with clouds and wind.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy
by Diane Coyle
Published 29 Oct 1998

But outbreaks of smashing the machinery of the first industrial revolution took place in England in 1800, 1812, 1816, 1826-7 and 1830. Luddism was a phenomenon of the textile industry. The worst riot in the cotton town I grew up in, Bury in East Lancashire, resulted in several deaths in April 1826. A crowd of 4000 marched down the picturesque Rossendale Valley from mill to grim mill, smashing the power looms which were destroying the livelihood of weavers scraping a living from handlooms in their cottages. Forty soldiers, defending the Chatterton mill in the hamlet of Stubbins, opened fire. One bullet hit Mary Simpson, a bystander. Another killed James Whatacre, a mill worker who had tried to save the warps from one of the new looms that had enraged the mob but was mistaken for a rioter.

…

‘The time may come when most tax lawyers are replaced by expert systems software, but human beings are still needed — and well-paid — for such truly difficult occupations as gardening, house cleaning, and the thousands of other services that will receive an ever-growing share of our expenditure as mere consumer goods become steadily cheaper’, he writes.5 The computer-adept professionals of today will be like the cottage weavers of the nineteenth century who cashed in on the earlier technical revolution in spinning until the development of the power loom made them redundant in their turn. There are certainly signs that the use of technology in financial services, for example, is eliminating a lot of routine jobs in the banking sector — it started with automatic teller machines and has now got as far as the current introduction of electronic imaging of cheques to avoid the need for human staff to key in values.

…

The textile industry is one of these. The only industrial economies that still have any significant clothing and footwear manufacturing are the poorest — Portugal and Malta, for example. Footwear, clothing and textiles account for a quarter of OECD imports of manufactured goods from non-OECD countries. The effect of the power loom on employment in Lancashire last century was trivial compared to the impact of Weightless Work 53 cheap imports in the 1980s. The industry’s capital stock was shipped direct from mill to scrap yard or textile museum in the space of less than a decade. This is just what economic theory would predict.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

THE LOOM OF THE SELF April 9, 2014 “IT IS HARD TO RESIST a technology that is also a tool of pleasure,” write Sarah Leonard and Kate Losse in the new issue of Dissent. “The Luddites smashed their power looms, but who wants to smash Facebook—with all one’s photos, birthday greetings, and invitations?” That’s on the money. Things do get messy, confused, when the means of production is also the means of communication, the means of expression, the means of entertainment, the means of shopping, the means of fill-in-the-blank. But out of such confusion comes, eventually, simplification, a concentration of effort and effect. Imagine if, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the power loom also served as a social medium. In weaving your quota of cloth, you also wove the story of your life and unfurled it in the public eye.

…

(Coupland), 102 Martin, Paul, 335 Marx, Karl, Marxism, xvii, xviii, 26, 83, 174, 308 Marx, Leo, 131 Maslow, Abraham, 117–20 massive open online courses (MOOCs), 133 master-slave metaphor, 307–9 mastery, 64–65 Mayer, Marissa, 268 Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor, 48 McAfee, Andrew, 195 McCain, John, 318 McKeen, William, 13–15 McLuhan, Marshall, 102–6, 183–84, 232, 326 McNealy, Scott, 257 measurement, 182 of experience, 197–98, 211–12 mechanical loom, 77 Mechanical Turk, 37–38 media: as advertorial, 53 big outlets for, 67 changes in, 53–54, 59–60 democratization of, xvi, xviii, 28 hegemony of internet in, 236–37 intellectual and social effects of, 103–6 as invasive, 105–6, 127–30 mainstream, 7–8 pursuit of immediacy in, 79 real world vs., 223 in shaping thought, 232 smartphones’ dominance of, 183–84 tools vs., 226 meditation, 162 Mehta, Mayank, 303 memory: association and cohesion in, 100–101 computer, 147, 231 cultural, 325–28 digital, 327 effect of computers on, 98–101, 234, 240 internet manipulation of, 48 neuroengineering of, 332–34 packaging of, 186 in revivification, 69–70 spatial, 290 time vs., 226 video games and, 94–97 Merholz, Peter, 21 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 300 Merton, Robert, 12–13 message-automation service, 167 Meyer, Stephenie, 50 Meyerowitz, Joanne, 338 microfilm, microphotography, 267 Microsoft, 108, 168, 205, 284 military technology, 331–32 Miller, Perry, xvii mindfulness, 162 Minima Moralia (Adorno), 153–54 mirrors, 138–39 Mitchell, Joni, 128 Mollie (video poker player), 218–19 monitoring: corporate control through, 163–65 of thoughts, 214–15 through wearable behavior-modification devices, 168–69 Montaigne, Michel de, 247, 249, 252, 254 Moore, Geoffrey, 209 Morlocks, 114, 186 “Morphological Basis of the Arm-to-Wing Transition, The” (Poore), 329–30 Morrison, Ewan, 288 Morrison, Jim, 126 Morse code, 34 “Most of It, The” (Frost), 145–46 motor skills, video games and, 93–94 “Mowing” (Frost), 296–300, 302, 304–5 MP3 players, 122, 123, 124, 216, 218, 293 multitasking, media, 96–97 Mumford, Lewis, 138–39, 235 Murdoch, Rupert and Wendi, 131 music: bundling of, 41–46 commercial use of, 244–45 copying and sharing technologies for, 121–26, 314 digital revolution in, 293–95 fidelity of, 124 listening vs. interface in, 216–18, 293 in participatory games, 71–72 streamed and curated, 207, 217–18 music piracy, 121–26 Musings on Human Metamorphoses (Leary), 171 Musk, Elon, 172 Musset, Alfred de, xxiii Muzak, 208, 244 MySpace, xvi, 10–11, 30–31 “Names of the Hare, The,” 201 nanotechnology, 69 Napster, 122, 123 narcissism, 138–39 Twitter and, 34–36 narrative emotions, 250 natural-language processing, 215 Negroponte, Nicholas, xx neobehavioralism, 212–13 Netflix, 92 neural networks, 136–37 neuroengineering, 332–33 New Critics, 249 News Feed, 320 news media, 318–20 newspapers: evolution of, 79, 237 online archives of, 47–48, 190–92 online vs. printed, 289 Newton, Isaac, 66 New York Public Library, 269 New York Times, 8, 71, 83, 133, 152–53, 195, 237, 283, 314, 342 erroneous information revived by, 47–48 on Twitter, 35 Nielsen Company, 80–81 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 126, 234–35, 237 Nightingale, Paul, 335 Nixon, Richard, 317 noise pollution, 243–46 Nook, 257 North of Boston (Frost), 297 nostalgia, 202, 204, 312 in music, 292–95 Now You See It (Davidson), 94 Oates, Warren, 203 Oatley, Keith, 248–50 Obama, Barack, 314 obsession, 218–19 OCLC, 276 “off grid,” 52 Olds, James, 235 O’Neill, Gerard, 171 One Infinite Loop, 76 Ong, Walter, 129 online aggregation, 192 On Photography (Sontag), xx open networks, profiteering from, 83–85 open-source projects, 5–7, 26 Oracle, 17 orchises, 305 O’Reilly, Tim, 3–5, 7 organ donation and transplantation, 115 ornithopters, 239 orphan books, 276, 277 Overture, 279–80 Owad, Tom, 256 Oxford Junior Dictionary, 201–2 Oxford University, library of, 269 Page, Larry, 23, 160, 172, 239, 268–69, 270, 279, 281–85 personal style of, 16–17, 281–82, 285 paint-by-number kits, 71–72 Paley, William, 43 Palfrey, John, 272–74, 277 Palmisano, Sam, 26 “pancake people,” 242 paper, invention and uses of, 286–89 Paper: An Elegy (Sansom), 287 Papert, Seymour, 134 Paradise within the Reach of All Men, The (Etzler), xvi–xvii paradox of time, 203–4 parenting: automation of, 181 of virtual child, 73–75 Parker, Sarah Jessica, 131 participation: “cognitive surplus” in, 59 as content and performance, 184 inclusionists vs. deletionists in, 18–20 internet, 28–29 isolation and, 35–36, 184 limits and flaws of, 5–7, 62 Paul, Rand, 314 Pendragon, Caliandras (avatar), 25 Pentland, Alex, 212–13 perception, spiritual awakening of, 300–301 personalization, 11 of ads, 168, 225, 264 isolation and, 29 loss of autonomy in, 264–66 manipulation through, 258–59 in message automation, 167 in searches, 145–46, 264–66 of streamed music, 207–9, 245 tailoring in, 92, 224 as threat to privacy, 255 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty), 300 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 215 phonograph, phonograph records, 41–46, 133, 287 photography, technological advancement in, 311–12 Pichai, Sundar, 181 Pilgrims, 172 Pinterest, 119, 186 playlists, 314 PlayStation, 260 “poetic faith,” 251 poetry, 296–313 polarization, 7 politics, transformed by technology, 314–20 Politics (Aristotle), 307–8 Poore, Samuel O., 329–30 pop culture, fact-mongering in, 58–62 pop music, 44–45, 63–64, 224 copying technologies for, 121–26 dead idols of, 126 industrialization of, 208–9 as retrospective and revivalist, 292–95 positivism, 211 Potter, Dean, 341–42 power looms, 178 Presley, Elvis, 11, 126 Prim Revolution, 26 Principles of Psychology (James), 203 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor), 238 printing press: consequences of, 102–3, 234, 240–41, 271 development of, 53, 286–87 privacy: devaluation of, 258 from electronic surveillance, 52 family cohesion vs., 229 free flow of information vs. right to, 190–94 internet threat to, 184, 255–59, 265, 285 safeguarding of, 258–59, 283 vanity vs., 107 proactive cognitive control, 96 Prochnik, George, 243–46 “Productivity Future Vision (2011),” 108–9 Project Gutenberg, 278 prosperity, technologies of, 118, 119–20 prosumerism, 64 protest movements, 61 Proust and the Squid (Wolf), 234 proximal clues, 303 public-domain books, 277–78 “public library,” debate over use of term, 272–74 punch-card tabulator, 188 punk music, 63–64 Quantified Self Global Conference, 163 Quantified Self (QS) movement, 163–65 Quarter-of-a-Second Rule, 205 racecars, 195, 196 radio: in education, 134 evolution of, 77, 79, 159, 288 as music medium, 45, 121–22, 207 political use of, 315–16, 317, 319 Radosh, Daniel, 71 Rapp, Jen, 341–42 reactive cognitive control, 96 Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature, 91 reading: brain function in, 247–54, 289–90 and invention of paper, 286–87 monitoring of, 257 video gaming vs., 261–62 see also books reading skills, changes in, 232–34, 240–41 Read Write Web (blog), 30 Reagan, Ronald, 315 real world: digital media intrusion in, 127–30 perceived as boring and ugly, 157–58 as source of knowledge, 313 virtual world vs., xx–xxi, 36, 62, 127–30, 303–4 reconstructive surgery, 239 record albums: copying of, 121–22 jackets for, 122, 224 technology of, 41–46 Redding, Otis, 126 Red Light Center, 39 Reichelt, Franz, 341 Reid, Rob, 122–25 relativists, 20 religion: internet perceived as, 3–4, 238 for McLuhan, 105 technology viewed as, xvi–xvii Republic of Letters, 271 reputations, tarnishing of, 47–48, 190–94 Resident Evil, 260–61 resource sharing, 148–49 resurrection, 69–70, 126 retinal implants, 332 Retromania (Reynolds), 217, 292–95 Reuters, Adam, 26 Reuters’ SL bureau, 26 revivification machine, 69–70 Reynolds, Simon, 217–18, 292–95 Rice, Isaac, 244 Rice, Julia Barnett, 243–44 Richards, Keith, 42 “right to be forgotten” lawsuit, 190–94 Ritalin, 304 robots: control of, 303 creepy quality of, 108 human beings compared to, 242 human beings replaced by, 112, 174, 176, 195, 197, 306–7, 310 limitations of, 323 predictions about, xvii, 177, 331 replaced by humans, 323 threat from, 226, 309 Rogers, Roo, 83–84 Rolling Stones, 42–43 Roosevelt, Franklin, 315 Rosen, Nick, 52 Rubio, Marco, 314 Rumsey, Abby Smith, 325–27 Ryan, Amy, 273 Sandel, Michael J., 340 Sanders, Bernie, 314, 316 Sansom, Ian, 287 Savage, Jon, 63 scatology, 147 Schachter, Joshua, 195 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 229 Schmidt, Eric, 13, 16, 238, 239, 257, 284 Schneier, Bruce, 258–59 Schüll, Natasha Dow, 218 science fiction, 106, 115, 116, 150, 309, 335 scientific management, 164–65, 237–38 Scrapbook in American Life, The, 185 scrapbooks, social media compared to, 185–86 “Scrapbooks as Cultural Texts” (Katriel and Farrell), 186 scythes, 302, 304–6 search-engine-optimization (SEO), 47–48 search engines: allusions sought through, 86 blogging, 66–67 in centralization of internet, 66–69 changing use of, 284 customizing by, 264–66 erroneous or outdated stories revived by, 47–48, 190–94 in filtering, 91 placement of results by, 47–48, 68 searching vs., 144–46 targeting information through, 13–14 writing tailored to, 89 see also Google searching, ontological connotations of, 144–46 Seasteading Institute, 172 Second Life, 25–27 second nature, 179 self, technologies of the, 118, 119–20 self-actualization, 120, 340 monitoring and quantification of, 163–65 selfies, 224 self-knowledge, 297–99 self-reconstruction, 339 self-tracking, 163–65 Selinger, Evan, 153 serendipity, internet as engine of, 12–15 SETI@Home, 149 sexbots, 55 Sex Pistols, 63 sex-reassignment procedures, 337–38 sexuality, 10–11 virtual, 39 Shakur, Tupac, 126 sharecropping, as metaphor for social media, 30–31 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 88 Shirky, Clay, 59–61, 90, 241 Shop Class as Soulcraft (Crawford), 265 Shuster, Brian, 39 sickles, 302 silence, 246 Silicon Valley: American culture transformed by, xv–xxii, 148, 155–59, 171–73, 181, 241, 257, 309 commercial interests of, 162, 172, 214–15 informality eschewed by, 197–98, 215 wealthy lifestyle of, 16–17, 195 Simonite, Tom, 136–37 simulation, see virtual world Singer, Peter, 267 Singularity, Singularitarians, 69, 147 sitcoms, 59 situational overload, 90–92 skimming, 233 “Slaves to the Smartphone,” 308–9 Slee, Tom, 61, 84 SLExchange, 26 slot machines, 218–19 smart bra, 168–69 smartphones, xix, 82, 136, 145, 150, 158, 168, 170, 183–84, 219, 274, 283, 287, 308–9, 315 Smith, Adam, 175, 177 Smith, William, 204 Snapchat, 166, 205, 225, 316 social activism, 61–62 social media, 224 biases reinforced by, 319–20 as deceptively reflective, 138–39 documenting one’s children on, 74–75 economic value of content on, 20–21, 53–54, 132 emotionalism of, 316–17 evolution of, xvi language altered by, 215 loom as metaphor for, 178 maintaining one’s microcelebrity on, 166–67 paradox of, 35–36, 159 personal information collected and monitored through, 257 politics transformed by, 314–20 scrapbooks compared to, 185–86 self-validation through, 36, 73 traditional media slow to adapt to, 316–19 as ubiquitous, 205 see also specific sites social organization, technologies of, 118, 119 Social Physics (Pentland), 213 Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise, 243–44 sociology, technology and, 210–13 Socrates, 240 software: autonomous, 187–89 smart, 112–13 solitude, media intrusion on, 127–30, 253 Songza, 207 Sontag, Susan, xx SoundCloud, 217 sound-management devices, 245 soundscapes, 244–45 space travel, 115, 172 spam, 92 Sparrow, Betsy, 98 Special Operations Command, U.S., 332 speech recognition, 137 spermatic, as term applied to reading, 247, 248, 250, 254 Spinoza, Baruch, 300–301 Spotify, 293, 314 “Sprite Sips” (app), 54 Squarciafico, Hieronimo, 240–41 Srinivasan, Balaji, 172 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 68 Starr, Karla, 217–18 Star Trek, 26, 32, 313 Stengel, Rick, 28 Stephenson, Neal, 116 Sterling, Bruce, 113 Stevens, Wallace, 158 Street View, 137, 283 Stroop test, 98–99 Strummer, Joe, 63–64 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), xxiii Such Stuff as Dreams (Oatley), 248–49 suicide rate, 304 Sullenberger, Sully, 322 Sullivan, Andrew, xvi Sun Microsystems, 257 “surf cams,” 56–57 surfing, internet, 14–15 surveillance, 52, 163–65, 188–89 surveillance-personalization loop, 157 survival, technologies of, 118, 119 Swing, Edward, 95 Talking Heads, 136 talk radio, 319 Tan, Chade-Meng, 162 Tapscott, Don, 84 tattoos, 336–37, 340 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 164, 237–38 Taylorism, 164, 238 Tebbel, John, 275 Technics and Civilization (Mumford), 138, 235 technology: agricultural, 305–6 American culture transformed by, xv–xxii, 148, 155–59, 174–77, 214–15, 229–30, 296–313, 329–42 apparatus vs. artifact in, 216–19 brain function affected by, 231–42 duality of, 240–41 election campaigns transformed by, 314–20 ethical hazards of, 304–11 evanescence and obsolescence of, 327 human aspiration and, 329–42 human beings eclipsed by, 108–9 language of, 201–2, 214–15 limits of, 341–42 master-slave metaphor for, 307–9 military, 331–32 need for critical thinking about, 311–13 opt-in society run by, 172–73 progress in, 77–78, 188–89, 229–30 risks of, 341–42 sociology and, 210–13 time perception affected by, 203–6 as tool of knowledge and perception, 299–304 as transcendent, 179–80 Technorati, 66 telegrams, 79 telegraph, Twitter compared to, 34 telephones, 103–4, 159, 288 television: age of, 60–62, 79, 93, 233 and attention disorders, 95 in education, 134 Facebook ads on, 155–56 introduction of, 103–4, 159, 288 news coverage on, 318 paying for, 224 political use of, 315–16, 317 technological adaptation of, 237 viewing habits for, 80–81 Teller, Astro, 195 textbooks, 290 texting, 34, 73, 75, 154, 186, 196, 205, 233 Thackeray, William, 318 “theory of mind,” 251–52 Thiel, Peter, 116–17, 172, 310 “Things That Connect Us, The” (ad campaign), 155–58 30 Days of Night (film), 50 Thompson, Clive, 232 thought-sharing, 214–15 “Three Princes of Serendip, The,” 12 Thurston, Baratunde, 153–54 time: memory vs., 226 perception of, 203–6 Time, covers of, 28 Time Machine, The (Wells), 114 tools: blurred line between users and, 333 ethical choice and, 305 gaining knowledge and perception through, 299–304 hand vs. computer, 306 Home and Away blurred by, 159 human agency removed from, 77 innovation in, 118 media vs., 226 slave metaphor for, 307–8 symbiosis with, 101 Tosh, Peter, 126 Toyota Motor Company, 323 Toyota Prius, 16–17 train disasters, 323–24 transhumanism, 330–40 critics of, 339–40 transparency, downside of, 56–57 transsexuals, 337–38 Travels and Adventures of Serendipity, The (Merton and Barber), 12–13 Trends in Biochemistry (Nightingale and Martin), 335 TripAdvisor, 31 trolls, 315 Trump, Donald, 314–18 “Tuft of Flowers, A” (Frost), 305 tugboats, noise restrictions on, 243–44 Tumblr, 166, 185, 186 Turing, Alan, 236 Turing Test, 55, 137 Twain, Mark, 243 tweets, tweeting, 75, 131, 315, 319 language of, 34–36 theses in form of, 223–26 “tweetstorm,” xvii 20/20, 16 Twilight Saga, The (Meyer), 50 Twitter, 34–36, 64, 91, 119, 166, 186, 197, 205, 223, 224, 257, 284 political use of, 315, 317–20 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 231, 242 Two-Lane Blacktop (film), 203 “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (Frost), 247–48 typewriters, writing skills and, 234–35, 237 Uber, 148 Ubisoft, 261 Understanding Media (McLuhan), 102–3, 106 underwearables, 168–69 unemployment: job displacement in, 164–65, 174, 310 in traditional media, 8 universal online library, 267–78 legal, commercial, and political obstacles to, 268–71, 274–78 universe, as memory, 326 Urban Dictionary, 145 utopia, predictions of, xvii–xviii, xx, 4, 108–9, 172–73 Uzanne, Octave, 286–87, 290 Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 277 vampires, internet giants compared to, 50–51 Vampires (game), 50 Vanguardia, La, 190–91 Van Kekerix, Marvin, 134 vice, virtual, 39–40 video games, 223, 245, 303 as addictive, 260–61 cognitive effects of, 93–97 crafting of, 261–62 violent, 260–62 videos, viewing of, 80–81 virtual child, tips for raising a, 73–75 virtual world, xviii commercial aspects of, 26–27 conflict enacted in, 25–27 language of, 201–2 “playlaborers” of, 113–14 psychological and physical health affected by, 304 real world vs., xx–xxi, 36, 62, 127–30 as restrictive, 303–4 vice in, 39–40 von Furstenberg, Diane, 131 Wales, Jimmy, 192 Wallerstein, Edward, 43–44 Wall Street, automation of, 187–88 Wall Street Journal, 8, 16, 86, 122, 163, 333 Walpole, Horace, 12 Walters, Barbara, 16 Ward, Adrian, 200 Warhol, Andy, 72 Warren, Earl, 255, 257 “Waste Land, The” (Eliot), 86, 87 Watson (IBM computer), 147 Wealth of Networks, The (Benkler), xviii “We Are the Web” (Kelly), xxi, 4, 8–9 Web 1.0, 3, 5, 9 Web 2.0, xvi, xvii, xxi, 33, 58 amorality of, 3–9, 10 culturally transformative power of, 28–29 Twitter and, 34–35 “web log,” 21 Wegner, Daniel, 98, 200 Weinberger, David, 41–45, 277 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 236 Wells, H.

Andrew Carnegie
by David Nasaw
Published 15 Nov 2007

Will Carnegie signed the letter on behalf of the Working Men’s Association, prefixing his signature with a line from Robert Burns: “‘It’s coming’ yet for a’ that,’ etc.”17 In late 1838, a modest upturn in trade and a compromise between the manufacturers and weavers on piece rates brought a degree of normalcy back to Dunfermline. The promise of future profits prompted renewed interest and new investment in power looms. According to Ebenezer Henderson, the major event of 1838 was the arrival of a “Mr. R. Robertson, manufacturer,” and the construction of the “Baldridge Works…for the weaving of table linen, etc., by steam power.” Though Robertson’s manufactory did not succeed, there was no guarantee that the handloom linen weavers would be as fortunate the next time. The forward march of the power looms appeared almost inexorable. In 1813, there had been no more than 1,500 of them in all of Scotland; by 1829, there were 10,000; by 1845, nearly 22,300.18 The heady optimism of 1838—when thousands gathered in Glasgow and elsewhere to cheer on the coming of the People’s Charter—gave way to a gritty, determined realism.

…

William was a little, fair-haired man, handsome in his way, but not terribly imposing. Their first child, Andra, who was born a year after their marriage, would take after the Carnegies in looks—he too was small and fair-haired—but had the Morrisons’ fiery temperament.8 The standard rise-and-fall narrative of the Dunfermline weavers attributes their downfall to the coming of power looms and manufactories; but because of the delicacy of their fabric and designs, the linen weavers were protected from industrialization far longer than those who worked with wool or cotton. Through the 1820s and 1830s, they profited from an American export market that remained strong because tariffs on linen were lower (America had no linen weavers to protect) than those on other textiles.

…

The American export market was absorbing all the fine tablecloths and napkins they could produce and the manufacturer-merchants who controlled the transatlantic trade had no option but to rely on them, as the linen they wove was too delicate and their Jacquard designs too elaborate to put onto power looms. With the prosperity of the mid-1830s had come an influx of new weavers to Dunfermline, including a large number of men from the cotton trade, but as long as the American market remained strong, there was enough work to go around. And then, with no warning, calamity struck. The Panic of 1837 in the United States drained American coffers of gold, the medium of international exchange.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
by Edward E. Baptist
Published 24 Oct 2016

The average number of spindles per mill grew from 780 to 6,770, and the number of power looms from 5 to 164—and in both cases, the machinery grew more efficient at processing fiber into thread and cloth. Just like the increasing sleight of left hands in the cotton fields, the accumulation of machinery increased the productivity of millworkers, enabling the typical textile worker of 1860 to make cloth five or six times more quickly than his or her counterpart of 1820. By the late 1830s, northern textile manufacturing was creating new spinoff industries as well. The machinists who built and repaired textile machinery not only improved power looms and spindles, but also invented and then produced stationary steam engines that could be harnessed to factory machinery.

…

If Rachel could’ve followed the bale, she’d have seen it loaded from the levee onto oceangoing vessels. These would carry the bales across the Atlantic to Liverpool on England’s northwestern coast, where dockworkers moved the bales to warehouses. After sale on the Liverpool cotton market, they went by canal barge to Manchester’s new mills. Textile workers—often former operators of hand-powered looms, or displaced farmworkers—opened the bales. Using new machines, they spun the cleaned cotton fibers into thread. Using other machines, they wove the thread into long pieces of cloth. Liverpool shipped the bolts of finished cloth, and they found their way into almost every city or town in the known world, including this one.

…

They relied on labor from southern New England’s worn-out agricultural sector, machinery designs stolen from Britain, and ever-cheaper southern cotton. Early factories had mechanized the process of spinning cotton, but still “put-out” thread to families who used home hand looms to weave it into cloth. Mill-based powered looms would enable the next transition to take place.11 In the 1820s, the “Boston Associates,” a group that included men such as Nathan Appleton and Abbot Lawrence, who would become Cotton Whigs and John G. Palfrey’s political enemies, planted a factory town on the Merrimack River in eastern Massachusetts.

When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity
by Anthony Berglas , William Black , Samantha Thalind , Max Scratchmann and Michelle Estes
Published 28 Feb 2015

Before each game, von Kempelen would open each of the doors of the machine one at a time to prove to the audience that it was purely mechanical. Rev. Edmund Cartwright was so intrigued by the Turk in 1784 that he would later question whether “it is more difficult to construct a machine that shall weave than one which shall make all the variety of moves required in that complicated game” and patented the first power loom shortly afterwards. Many fanciful theories were postulated as to how the machine worked, including one claim that it must be fake because it sometimes lost a game but a real machine would not make mistakes. It was not until after the machine’s eventual destruction in a fire in 1854 that the key technology that facilitated this amazing performance was revealed, which was a sliding seat within the body of the machine.

…

Technologies from the steam tractor to the combine harvester have reduced that proportion to under 10%. Yet we do not have 80% more leisure. Indeed, primitive hunter-gatherer societies such as the Australian Aboriginals seem to have had more leisure time than we do today. Likewise, the Industrial Revolution produced a huge increase in productivity. A nineteenth century power loom could increase the productivity of a textile worker by a factor of 40, which is far, far more than the very substantial general increase in productivity during the last hundred years. Yet, rather than producing more leisure, it produced twelve-hour work-days for six and a half days per week, which paid such a miserable wage that it could barely sustain life.

…

Elizabeth turned down Lee’s request not because she thought the invention was unworthy, but because she thought it was too effective. Elizabeth was concerned that the machine could cause unemployment in the hand knitting industry and thus chose to forgo the benefits of cheaper knitted fabrics. For similar reasons, groups of textile workers in the early nineteenth century would destroy the stocking frames and power looms of factory owners, acting in the name of King Ludd. Some bands of agricultural workers destroyed threshing machines for the same reason. Parliament then made machine breaking a capital crime in order to try to suppress this movement. Today, the term “Luddite” is used to refer to people that foolishly wish to live in the past, but at the time they had considerable sympathy from many sectors of society.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

The hand-powered spinning wheel was introduced in China and the Islamic world in the eleventh century, and the foot treadle appeared in the 1500s. You only have to look at illustrated fairy tales to see spinning wheels in widespread use. But the earlier machines didn’t launch an industrial revolution, while Hargreaves’s invention, along with the steam engine and even more sophisticated power looms that came later, did. Why? Historians have been debating this for centuries, but they agree on a few reasons. First, unlike silk, wool, and hemp, which were used in many of the earlier machines, cotton was a commodity that could reach everyone. It was simply the cheapest and most available fiber in the world, even more so once the expanding British trade empire brought bales of the stuff from India, Egypt, and the New World.

…

The tragedy focused national attention on the downtrodden city, and provided an opportunity to rethink the city center. Today, that is well under way. In Manchester’s center today is Spinningfields, which in the 1880s was a packed district of textile factory complexes, each employing as many as fifteen thousand women working power looms and sewing machines. Today, Spinningfields is a modern office and shopping district, with high-end boutiques and dramatic architecture. Its industrial past is reflected in the two-story windows of one clothing store, which displays an art installation matrix of hundreds of old Singer sewing machines.

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will
by Geoff Colvin
Published 3 Aug 2015

By the time the Industrial Revolution got going, the pattern was well established. People hated technology that improved productivity. Luddites, smashing power looms in the early nineteenth century, were only the most famous exemplars. These protesters were right in the short run, but in the long run they were resoundingly wrong. New technology does destroy jobs, but it also creates new ones—jobs for people who operate the stocking frames and power looms, for example. More important, better technology creates better jobs. Workers using improved technology are more productive, so they earn more—and spend more, creating more new jobs across the economy.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David S. Landes
Published 14 Sep 1999

.* Rapid change there began with the spinning jenny of James Hargreaves (c. 1766), followed by Thomas Arkwright’s water frame (1769) and Samuel Crompton’s mule (1779), so called because it was a cross between the jenny and the water frame. With the mule, one could spin fine counts as well as coarse, better and cheaper than any hand spinner. Then in 1787 Edmund Cartwright built the first successful power loom, which gradually transformed weaving, first of coarse yarn, which stood up better to the to-and-fro of the shuttle, then of fine; and in 1830 Richard Roberts, an experienced machine builder, devised—in response to employer demand—a “self-acting” mule to free spinning from dependence on the strength and special skill of an indocile labor aristocracy.

…

Here, as on the European continent, British expatriates were the primary agents of technological diffusion.12 Yet the character of the receiving society mattered even more. The few carriers who brought the knowledge found quick students to copy, imitate, and, most important, improve. When Francis Lowell of Boston introduced the power loom in 1814, he found a ready workforce, descendants of “many generations of farmer-mechanics in the workshops of New England.”13 So a few machines came from England, but only a few, and Americans were soon adapting them to the needs and tastes of the home market. (They were also inventing new devices and exporting them to Britain—the best sign of technological independence.)14 Thus British cotton spinners used the mule, which called for highly skilled, invariably masculine, labor, and concentrated on finer counts of yarn; while the Americans developed the throstle (derived from Arkwright’s water frame), which used semiskilled women workers to make a tougher, coarser yarn; and then substantially increased its productivity by the invention, first of cap spinning, and then of ring spinning.

…

Beginning in the 1820s, a good part of these earnings flowed into a massive educational and industrial effort—into technical and military schools, and a wide variety of mills and shops for the manufacture of textiles, metals and metal products, chemicals, rope, arms, ships, and the like—all the things necessary to replace imports and feed a growing war machine. The viceroy even sought a deeper independence by buying European machines and copying them in Egypt. In the face of British export prohibitions, the Egyptians got permission in 1826 to import five hundred power looms from Galloway’s in Manchester. No harm would follow, assured a scornful William Huskisson, president of the Board of Trade; in six months “they would have been knocked to pieces.”13 Some say that Muhammad Ali was trying to build a war machine; others, that he was aiming at an industrial revolution in a land far behind the European follower countries.† It was a quixotically bold vision, one that was bound to vex European industrial and trading interests: the first attempt by a backward, non-Western society to build a modern industrial economy—by command from above.14 The extent of Muhammad Ali’s success and the reasons for his ultimate failure have been sharply debated.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

Zeros and Ones persuasively shows how women have always been inextricably involved with protocological technology. Using the telephone operator as an example, she argues that women have traditionally comprised the laboring core of networks of all kinds, particularly the telecommunications networks. From the power loom to typewriting, (even to the discovery of the computer bug), Plant categorizes technology as a fundamentally female object. Even the zero—the nothingness of binary code—has always been the 0-ther, the female. On the writing of Zeros and Ones, Plant remembers: “When I started the book it was really to try and correct, what I thought was the great misconception at the moment about the relationship between women and computers in particular and technology in general.

…

It seemed to me, that a lot of ‘orthodox’ feminist theory was still very technophobic.”38 Technophobic she is not. Throughout Plant’s book the intersection of woman and the protocological matrix is primary. This materializes itself historically in the matrix-based weaving processes of industrial power looms, in the predominantly female operators of phone networks, in the trope of the woman as computer programmer (Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper) and in the weblike structure of cyberspace. Because of this history, Plant writes that technology threatens phallic control and is fundamentally a process of emasculation.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

In 1764 James Hargreaves introduced the spinning jenny, which could spin eight threads at a time, and five years later James Arkwright improved on it with the water frame, so called because it was powered by a waterwheel. This mechanization made thread abundant, and, now to speed up the weaving, the Reverend Edmund Cartwright developed the power loom in 1785. The new machinery required a shift from home production by the putting-out method to factory production by labor paid hourly wages. Cotton cloth production increased dramatically. In 1765 about five hundred thousand pounds of cotton was spun into thread in Britain, almost all of it at home.

…

His father was a hand weaver who owned his own loom, on which he made intricately patterned damask cloth. Dunfermline was a center of the damask trade, and skilled weavers such as William Carnegie could make a good living at it. But the Industrial Revolution destroyed William Carnegie’s livelihood. By the 1840s power looms could produce cloth such as damask much more cheaply than handlooms. While there had been 84,560 handloom weavers in Scotland in 1840, there would be only 25,000 ten years later. William Carnegie would not be one of them. The elder Carnegie sank into despair, and his far tougher-minded wife took charge of the crisis.

…

B., 155–57, 160 Morton, Levi P., 198 Motor Carrier Act, 392 Murdock, William, 163 mutual funds, 370 NASDAQ, 417 Nation, 341–42 National Banking Act, 224 National Cordage Company, 264 national debt, 343, 380, 381 Budget Control Act and, 390 in Civil War, 192–93, 194, 199 Hamilton’s program for, 73–75 Jackson’s opposition to, 125–26 in 1980s, 416–17 in World War I, 292 in World War II, 358 National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC), 354 National Employment Act, 335 National Grange, 236–37 National Industrial Recovery Act, 335 National Labor Relations Board, 344, 361 National Labor Union, 250 National Recovery Administration (NRA), 335–36, 344 Navigation Acts, 41–42, 54–55, 62 Nelson, Donald, 355–57 Netherlands, 9, 10, 37–38, 40, 41, 60 Neutrality Act, 349 Newcomen, Thomas, 132 New Deal, 326–27, 335–39, 342–44, 382, 389, 392, 395, 398 effects of, 335, 336–39 Second, 344–46 New England, 27–29, 40, 46, 92, 93, 121 cloth industry of, 94–96 cod fishery of, 29–30 Embargo Act and, 95–96 iron industry of, 32–36 lumber industry of, 30–31 road development in, 100–101 shipping industry of, 31–32 tariff debate and, 90, 292–93 whaling industry of, 168–69 New Jersey, 101, 258–59 steamboat monopoly conflict and, 142–45 New Netherland, 37–38, 44 newspapers, 158–61, 166, 220, 281 New York and Harlem Line, 212 New York Central Railroad, 212, 213, 229, 233–34, 236 New York City, 61, 63, 109–10, 158, 185, 367, 391 corruption reform in, 220–22 September 11 attacks in, 418–19 slums of, 244–45 water supply of, 165 wealthy elite of, 260–62 New York colony, 37–38 New York Federal Reserve, 312, 321, 323, 337, 362 New York Gold Exchange, 198 New York Herald, 130, 159–61, 185–86, 214, 226, 303, 412 New York Public Library, 261 New York State, 86, 93 corruption in, 207–8, 215–16, 220–22 incorporation statute of, 229 steamboat monopoly of, 142–45 see also Erie Canal New York State Bar Association, 221 New York Statesman, 144 New York Stock Exchange, 70, 79, 154, 185, 197–98, 199, 205, 215–16, 227, 230, 279, 331 accounting practices and, 231 crash of 1929 and, 314–16 crash of 1987 and, 397–98 deregulation of, 393–94 establishment of, 111–12 panic of 1914 and, 286–87 reform of, 339–42 see also stock markets New York Sun, 219–20 New York Times, 211, 220, 282, 285–86, 303, 318, 395, 412 New York Tribune, 208, 231 Niles’ Weekly Register, 111 Nine Years’ War, 46, 54 Nixon, Richard, 344, 384–85, 390 Nonintercourse Act, 95 Norris-La Guardia Act, 344 North, Dudley, 40 North American Review, 161 North Carolina, 47, 85, 180 Northern Securities Corporation, 262–63 Northwest Ordinance, 86 “Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, and of a Coinage for the United States” (Jefferson), 69–70 Noyce, Robert, 408 Nullification Crisis of 1832, 97 O’Donnell, Hugh, 254 Office of Management and Budget, 390 Office of Production Management (OPM), 354, 355 Ohio, 100, 106, 141, 172 oil industry, 167–71, 259, 386 advent of automobile and, 299 embargo of 1973 and, 387–88 whaling and, 167–69 Older Americans Act, 382 Omaha World-Herald, 269 Open Board of Brokers, 199–200, 215 Oregon Territory, 179 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 386 Orth, Godlove S., 204 Otto, Nickolaus, 296 Pacific Railroad Act, 217 Panama Canal, 281, 282 panics, economic, see depressions, economic paper money, 46, 47, 76–77, 121, 126, 128, 195, 196, 197, 202 Parliament, British, 18, 52, 55, 388 Parsons, Charles, 305 partnerships, 9–10, 229 Peabody, George, 233, 261 Pecora, Ferdinand J., 339 Penn, William, 38, 51 Pennsylvania, 72, 75, 101, 229 Pennsylvania colony, 38–39, 46 Pennsylvania Railroad, 213, 234, 236, 237–38, 245, 252–53 pet banks, 129–30 Petroleum Board, 199 Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, 264 Philadelphia-Lancaster Turnpike, 100 Philadelphia mint, 70–71 philanthropy, 261–62 Pinkerton Detective Agency, 253–54 Pitt, William, 56 Plessy v. Ferguson, 274 Poland, 349, 375, 418 Polk, James K., 181 Pollack v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust, 274 Populist Party, 270 Portfolio, 126 pound sterling, British, 47, 323 power loom, 88, 243 price controls, 384–85 Principles of Economics (Marshall), 378–79 printing press, invention of, 7 Pryor, David, 399 Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick, 158 Puritans, 27–28 Quakers, 38–40, 51 Quebec Act of 1764, 99 racism, 19, 373 civil rights movement and, 374–75 slavery and, 203 railroads, 162, 166, 183, 252, 255 concept of, 146–47 corporate structure of, 228–30 corruption of, see Erie Railway Corsair agreement and, 234 economic effects of, 151 entrepreneurs and, 149–50 firewood demand and, 171–72 Granger movement and, 236–37 national economy and, 235–36 national markets and, 148–49 oil industry and, 256–57 regional, 237–39 transcontinental, 216–20 Vanderbilt and, 212–14 Railroad Transportation (Hadley), 148–49 Randolph, Edmund, 78 Reagan, Ronald, 391–92, 395, 396, 416 rearmament program of, 414–15 recession, 346 of 1990–1991, 416–17 Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), 326–27 Relief and Reconstruction Act, 326 “Report on a National Bank” (Hamilton), 77 “Report on Manufactures” (Hamilton), 92, 96 “Report on the Public Credit” (Hamilton), 73 Republican Party, 220, 238, 265, 271, 272, 342–43, 371, 394–95 income tax debate and, 274–75, 276 Reuther, Walter, 345 Revenue Act of 1942, 358–59 rice trade, 25–27, 83 robber baron, 211–12 Rockefeller, John D., 222, 256, 257, 260, 261, 263, 292 Rolfe, John, 15 Roman Empire, xiii, 7, 243, 385 Roosevelt, Franklin D., xviii, 122, 275, 332–33, 338, 340, 342, 363, 374, 382, 392, 398, 414 Hoover contrasted with, 328–29 Hundred Days of, 334–36 in World War II, 349, 350, 352, 354, 356 Roosevelt, Theodore, 206, 239, 262–63, 275, 276, 280 Rope Trust, 264 Rostenkowski, Dan, 395–96 Roth, William, 390–91 Rural Electrification Administration, 345–46 Russell, William Howard, 220 Russia, 120, 285, 288, 291, 293, 294 rust belt, 387–88 Sandys, Edwin, 17, 18 savings and loans associations, 398–400 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 401 Schuyler, Philip, 105 Schwab, Charles, 289 Scott, Thomas A., 245 Second Bank of the United States, xviii, 121–22, 126–28, 192, 217, 281, 337 Second New Deal, 344–46 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 340–41, 393 Seldon, George B., 296 Selective Service Act, 353 Senate, U.S., 72, 117, 325, 333, 340 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 418–19 Seven Years’ War, 54, 56 Shaftesbury, Lord Ashley, earl of, 24 sharecropping system, 202–3 Shays’s Rebellion, 64–65 Shepherd, William, 65 Sherman, John, 193, 273, 274 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 193, 218 Sherman Antitrust Act, 238–39, 262–63 Sherman Silver Act, 267 shilling, 70 shipbuilding industry, 31, 354 shipping industry, 31–32, 110–11 Civil War and, 202 clipper ships and, 183 Shiras, George, 275 Shreve, Henry, 138–40 Silliman, Benjamin, Jr., 170, 171 silver, 266–67 Singer, Isaac, 176 Slater, Samuel, 90–92, 93, 95 slavery, 26, 28, 83 in American colonies, 51–52 Civil War and, 202–3 cotton trade and, 86–87 identity of South and, 87–88 racism and, 203 triangle trade and, 32 in Virginia, 18–20 in West Indies, 23 Sloan, Alfred P., 310 slums, 242–43 Smith, Adam, 40–41, 66, 120, 189, 377, 378 Smith, F.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

The Boston Manufacturing Company proved so successful that it declared a dividend of 17 percent in October 1817 and invested in another mill in 1818. The power loom enabled factories to weave yarn into cloth under a single roof rather than having to send thread out to be spun in specialized spinning mills, quickly reducing the cost of production by half. The new technology spread rapidly across New England: by 1820, 86 firms were using 1,667 power looms while traditional spinning mills in Philadelphia and Rhode Island were forced to shut up shop.10 Production boomed from 4 million yards of cotton cloth a year in 1817 to 308 million twenty years later.11 As well as importing the idea of the factory from Britain, the Yankees pioneered a new system of production—what Europeans called the “American system of production,” and what might better be known as the system of interchangeable parts.

…

In 1859, he talked about commercializing his idea for a “steam plough” but soon found that he had other more pressing matters on his hands. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the lion’s share of this ingenuity went to the textile industry rather than bellows and steam plows. Northern textile makers turned their region into a spinning and weaving powerhouse by a combination of industrial espionage—stealing the idea for power looms from Britain—and commercial moxie. In 1790, Almy and Brown built a textile mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, using designs that a British immigrant, Samuel Slater, “Slater the traitor” to the British, had memorized. (The British had banned immigrants from taking plans of the new looms to the United States, even searching their luggage, but couldn’t do anything about feats of memory like Slater’s.)

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

Inventors, entrepreneurs, and other innovators weren’t just tolerated in America—they were often glorified. Even the celebration of America’s centennial in 1876 highlighted the nation’s commercial achievements as much as its political achievements. At Machinery Hall in Philadelphia, “a profusion of mechanisms seduced the eye: power looms, lathes, sewing machines, presses, pumps, toolmaking machines, axles, shafts, wire cables, and locomotives.”32 The Times (London) concluded that “The American invents as the Greek sculpted and the Italian painted: it is genius.”33 Invention is only one aspect of innovation, and alongside this multitude of inventions came innovations in the organization and capitalization of productive enterprises.

…

Only such large-scale organizations could mass produce the goods Americans wanted to buy at a price they were willing and able to pay. The key development in this regard was the rise of the modern corporation, which could amass and deploy unprecedented amounts of capital investment.34 Much of that capital was used to buy expensive tools of production—factories, power looms, steam engines, electric generators, cranes, blast furnaces—which, thanks to the economies of scale made possible by mass production, slashed production costs. By using these economies of scale, Andrew Carnegie, for instance, was able to reduce the cost of making steel from about $100 a ton to only $12 a ton, while John D.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

A well-documented tragedy of the Industrial Revolution in England is the fate of the handloom weavers.22 The automation of spinning toward the end of the eighteenth century meant that there was much more yarn available to be woven. Automated power looms were only slowly being introduced, so there was strong demand for the labor of handloom weavers to weave the now abundantly available yarn into cloth. Unfortunately, the writing was on the wall—these jobs would be automated also. Indeed, because it was costly to let expensive power looms lie idle, the handloom weavers were already the first to be deprived of work when business slowed. Nevertheless, even as wages in handloom weaving fell as automation and the entry of workers created a labor surplus, the numbers joining the handloom weaving sector continued to increase.

…

His dismal view of competition had less resonance with Adam Smith, though, than with another insightful economist, Karl Marx. THE MARXIST RESPONSE The Industrial Revolution that started in Britain in the late eighteenth century created tremendous new possibilities as well as widespread despair. I have already referred to workers displaced by new machines like the power loom. In addition, though, the promise of new technologies, as well as new lands, especially in the Americas, made accessible by railways and the steamship, prompted waves of euphoria fueled by finance. The business cycle, with its production booms and busts, emerged in many industrializing countries, as did the financial cycle, with sustained booms in lending and euphoric rises in land and stock prices, followed by crashes.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

History shows us that once a new technology starts to take hold in an industry or in consumer markets, there is no successful defence for a traditional business model against that new technology beyond a few years, ever… The Industrial Revolution was centred in Great Britain (the dominant world power of the day) and started about 1760, focusing initially on advances in the two largest industries of the time—the textile and agricultural industries. The changes in the textile industry really started to take hold in the early 1800s with the use of labour-saving machinery such as the stocking frame, spinning frames and power looms. Power looms were initially powered by water (mills) but, by 1803, Thomas Johnson and others were building looms based on steam engine technology. The steam engine typically drove a leather belt which, in turn, powered a “warp” and a “shuttle” that mimicked the way a textile operator worked a manual loom.

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History
by Kassia St Clair
Published 3 Oct 2018

In 1760 the Journal for the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce offered rewards for ‘a machine for spinning six threads of Wool, Cotton, Flax, or Silk, at one time, and that will require but one person to work and attend it’. They soon got their wish: over the course of a century the Spinning Jenny, the Water Frame and the Power Loom and a host of other inventions exponentially increased the rates of production. Think of the Industrial Revolution and coal and steel will spring to mind, but it would be more accurate were we to picture instead the busy whir of threaded looms and cavernous factories choked with cotton dust. Indeed, even so fundamental an economic principle as division of labour had as a model the making of textiles.

…

To correct this imbalance, inventors focused on improving the speed of spinners. In 1764 James Hargreaves created the spinning jenny; five years later came Richard Arkwright’s water frame; and a decade after that, the steam-powered mule was set in motion by Samuel Crompton. All exponentially improved the quantity of spun yarn. In 1785, Edmund Cartwright’s power loom became the first steam-powered weaving machine. So much labour- and time-saving mechanisation meant that, for the first time in history, cloth-making was being taken from hands and homes and transferred to machines and factories.27 For industrialists and merchants, of course, this made financial sense.

Growth: A Reckoning
by Daniel Susskind
Published 16 Apr 2024

And the argument was deceptively simple: that escape must have happened through sustained ‘technological progress’. As explanations go, this might sound a little prosaic: the Industrial Revolution, after all, is widely known to have been a time of unprecedented technological ingenuity. Canonical inventions like the spinning jenny, the power loom and the steam engine were all dreamed up and put to use during those decades. But what Solow-Swan added to that familiar narrative of technological upheaval was a deeper explanation for why this technological progress was so important in causing growth. That was a crucial but largely absent piece of the intellectual puzzle.

…

When Allen was exploring wages and prices around the world about the time that the Industrial Revolution began, he noticed something striking: not only were British wages ‘remarkably high’ compared to other countries, but energy was also ‘remarkably cheap’.4 This particular combination of costs, Allen saw, created a unique economic incentive in Britain. Its profit-hungry manufacturers were driven to develop technologies that saved on expensive labour and made use of the cheap energy that was readily available: Newcomen’s steam engine, Hargreaves’ spinning jenny, Arkwright’s roller spinner, Cartwright’s power loom. With this discovery, Allen had found the missing part of the story. ‘The reason the Industrial Revolution was British,’ he wrote, ‘was because it was profitable to invent the famous inventions in Britain whereas it was not profitable to do the necessary R&D anywhere else.’5 Why were these revolutionary technologies not adopted on the European continent?

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization
by Vaclav Smil
Published 16 Dec 2013

In either case weavers could produce cloth only as wide as their arm span and wider cloth required the cooperation of two weavers. This changed in 1733 with John Kay's invention of a flying shuttle that could be sent by flicks of the wrist from one end of the loom to another; the most important innovation allowing cheaper, mass-scale production of cloth came in 1785 with Edmund Cartwright's power loom (initially powered by steam). A no less important innovation was the response to imports of Indian printed cotton fabrics (calico, produced in Calicut since the eleventh century) to Europe. Adoption of Indian techniques by European craftsmen began in France before 1650, before 1700 both French and English workshops were able to produce lasting colors and the practice spread to the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.

…

But the paper was cheap and the effects on consumption were obvious: for example, in 1872 Montgomery Ward's catalogue had a single page, two decades later it had more than 600 pages (Montgomery Ward & Company, 1895). The superior solution (pulping using the sulfate process) was invented in 1879 by a Swedish chemist, Carl F. Dahl, but it was commercialized widely only after 1900. As for textiles, the nineteenth-century revolution was mostly quantitative, as mechanized weaving, based on Carthwight's power loom and Watt's more efficient steam engine, opened the way to the mass production of fabric and as higher incomes in urbanizing and industrializing societies created new markets for all kinds of textile products by expanding the ownership of clothes beyond what was commonly just a single set (or two) of outer garments.

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution
by Charles R. Morris
Published 1 Jan 2012

Perkins recommended Moody, who was an inspired choice, for he had first trained as a weaver—under Scotsmen, who were known for their high-craft weaving tradition—and only then as a machinist under Perkins. Lowell’s strategic vision was as bold as his financing approach. Yarn making and weaving had always been viewed as a separate industries, like flour manufacturing and baking. The two trades had also mechanized at different rates. The Cartwright power loom was patented in 1785, twenty years after the Arkwright spinning frame, and was still an immature technology. British weaving was mostly on the “putting-out” cottage industry basis, and few plants had both power-spinning and power-weaving operations. But Lowell wanted an integrated production line from the start.

…

Ships were lost, commodity prices see-sawed, trade bills defaulted. Cycles of credit expansion and contraction regularly wreaked havoc in all merchant communities. y It does not dim Lowell’s accomplishment to doubt the conventional tale that he returned from England with a complete design of a power loom in his head. It is more plausible that he returned with a few sketches and a firm conviction that power weaving was readily achievable, and that Paul Moody then designed and built the looms. Moody, after all, was both a skilled weaver and a great machinist, who probably needed only Lowell’s backing to develop a working loom.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
by Edward L. Glaeser
Published 1 Jan 2011

But all that sail-specific human capital lost its value with the rise of steamships, and in the midnineteenth century, Boston had to reinvent itself yet again, this time around manufacturing. A Harvard-educated scion of a shipping family, Francis Cabot Lowell, had traveled to England in 1810 and brought an understanding of Manchester’s power looms back to the Boston area. Lowell’s mills were powered by rivers outside the city, but as engines got smaller, factories moved within city limits. In the nineteenth century, the area’s intellectual establishment flourished alongside its resurgent economy, and various elements in Boston’s vibrant religious mosaic founded new colleges: Tufts by Universalists in 1852, Boston College by Jesuits in 1863, Boston University by Methodists in 1871, and Wellesley by a lawyer-turned-lay-preacher in 1875.

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t=113646. 232 allocated £400 . . . for a college: Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard; and Quincy, History of Harvard. 232 Another £375 and four hundred books: Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 9. 232 “most literate society then existing”: McCullough, Reformation, 520. 233 In 1647, a famine . . . fortune during the Colonial era: Rutman, “Governor Winthrop’s Garden Crop.” 233 The city exported . . . food and wood to the Caribbean: Ibid., 131-32. 233 Boston’s first-mover advantage . . . as China and South Africa: Ibid. 234 an understanding of Manchester’s power looms: “Lowell, Francis Cabot,” Encyclopædia Britannica. 234 religious mosaic founded new colleges: Tufts: “The Founding of Tufts University,” www.tufts.edu/home/get_to_know_tufts/history; Boston College: “History: From the South End to Chestnut Hill,” www.bc.edu/about/history.html, Feb. 5, 2010; Boston University: “Timeline,” www.bu.edu/timeline; and Wellesley: “College History,” web.wellesley.edu/web/AboutWellesley/CollegeHistory. 234 Vannevar Bush: “Raytheon: A History of Global Technology Leadership,” www.raytheon.com/ourcompany/history. 234 Raytheon’s current headquarters: The Raytheon Web site has a Google map confirming location on the reservoir near Route 128; address: Raytheon Company, 870 Winter Street, Waltham, MA 02451-1449. 234 engineers from MIT and Harvard created companies: Dorfman, “High Technology Economy.” 234 Wang had 30,000 employees and DEC had over 120,000: Wang: “An American Tragedy,” Economist, Aug. 22, 1992, 56-58.

Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain
by Christian Wolmar
Published 1 Mar 2009

Boulton & Watt, his partnership with the Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, became the most important builder of steam engines in the world, providing the power for the world’s first steam-powered boat, the Charlotte Dundas, and ‘orders flooded in for engines to drive sugar mills in the West Indies, cotton mills in America, flour mills in Europe and many other applications’.3 Boulton & Watt had cornered the market by registering a patent which effectively gave them a monopoly on all steam engine development until the end of the eighteenth century. Steam power quickly became commonplace in the nineteenth century: by the time the concept of the Liverpool & Manchester railway was being actively developed in the mid-1820s, Manchester alone had the staggering number of 30,000 steam-powered looms.4 However, putting the engines on wheels and getting such a contraption to haul wagons presented a host of new problems. There had been several unsuccessful attempts to develop a steam locomotive, starting with Nicholas Cugnot’s fardier5 in Paris in 1769, which was declared a danger to the public when it hit a wall and overturned.

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G., ref1 gramophone records, ref1 Grand Junction Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; amalgamation, ref8, ref9 Grangemouth, ref1, ref2 Granite City, ref1 Grantham, ref1; accident, ref2 Granville Express, ref1 Gravesend, ref1 Gravesend & Rochester Railway, ref1 Gray, Thomas, ref1, ref2 Grayling, Chris, ref1 Great Central Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; creation of, ref5; and cooperation, ref6; publicity, ref7; fish services, ref8; and wartime, ref9, ref10; closure, ref11 Great Eastern Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; maps, ref8; and amalgamation, ref9, ref10; wine list, ref11 Great Exhibition, ref1, ref2 Great Heck accident, ref1 Great North of Scotland Railway, ref1 Great North Road, ref1 Great Northern Advertiser, ref1 Great Northern Cemetery, ref1 Great Northern Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8; route to Scotland and railway races, ref9, ref10, ref11; costs, ref12; track length, ref13; topography, ref14; enters price war, ref15; and Midland Railway, ref16, ref17; introduces third class, ref18; locomotive confiscated, ref19; begins selling coal, ref20; and amalgamation, ref21, ref22 Great Western Magazine, ref1 Great Western Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; gauge, ref7, ref8, ref9; costs, ref10; speeds, ref11; and parliamentary trains, ref12; and royal travel, ref13; freight services, ref14; track length, ref15; time system, ref16; expansion, ref17; consolidation, ref18, ref19, ref20; and Welsh lines, ref21; and Irish services, ref22; treatment of poorer passengers, ref23; offers hunters’ tickets, ref24; financial difficulties, ref25; accidents, ref26, ref27; telegraph system, ref28; wages and bonuses, ref29, ref30; industrial relations, ref31, ref32, ref33; provident society, ref34; working hours, ref35; first corridor train, ref36; and railway races, ref37, ref38; modernization and improvements, ref39, ref40; and cooperation, ref41; publicity, ref42, ref43, ref44, ref45; loss-making services, ref46; and Helston line, ref47; compensation claim, ref48; and amalgamation, ref49, ref50, ref51; profitability, ref52, ref53, ref54; introduces warning system, ref55; livery, ref56, ref57; service improvements, ref58; hundredth anniversary, ref59; and wartime, ref60, ref61; workshops, ref62; and diesels, ref63 Greeks, ancient, ref1 Green, Chris, ref1 Greenwich, ref1 Greenwich Mean Time, ref1 Gresley, Nigel, ref1, ref2 Gretna Junction, ref1 Grey, Earl, ref1 Grimsby, ref1, ref2 ‘Grouse Traffic’, ref1 Guildford, ref1 Gunnislake, ref1 hackney cabs, ref1 Hackworth, Timothy, ref1, ref2, ref3 Halifax, ref1 Hall, Stanley, ref1 Hampshire, ref1 Hampton Court, ref1 Hardy, Thomas, ref1 Harford, Edward, ref1 Harrow, ref1; accident, ref2 Hartlepool, ref1 Harwich, ref1, ref2 Hastings, ref1, ref2, ref3 Hatfield, ref1; accident, ref2, ref3 Heath, Edward, ref1, ref2 Heathrow Express, ref1 Hedley, William, ref1 Helmsdale, ref1 Helston, ref1 Henry, Thomas, ref1 Henshaw, David, ref1, ref2, ref3 Herapath, John, ref1 Hereford, ref1, ref2 Hertfordshire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hetton Colliery, ref1 Hewitt, John, ref1 High Speed One, ref1, ref2 High Speed Train (HST), ref1, ref2, ref3 High Street Kensington station, ref1 High Wycombe, ref1 Highbridge, ref1 Highland Railway, ref1; wartime service, ref2, ref3 Highlands, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Hill, Rowland, ref1 Hitchin, ref1 Holborn Viaduct station, ref1 Holden, Michael, ref1 Holiday Haunts, ref1 holiday trains, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Holland, ref1, ref2 Holyhead, ref1, ref2 hooliganism, ref1 Hopton incline, ref1 Hornsey, ref1 horses, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8; on Swansea & Mumbles Railway, ref9; and railway gauge, ref10; and Stockton & Darlington Railway, ref11; and Liverpool & Manchester Railway, ref12, ref13; bolting, ref14, ref15; and trams, ref16; and railway amalgamation, ref17; under BR, ref18, ref19 hotels, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hounslow, ref1 Household Words, ref1 housing, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Howson, Martha, ref1 Huddersfield, ref1 Hudson, George, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Hughes, Henry, ref1 Huish, Captain Mark, ref1, ref2, ref3 Hull, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; Royal Station Hotel, ref6; Paragon station, ref7, ref8 Hull & Barnsley Railway, ref1, ref2 Hull Trains, ref1 Hundred of Manhood & Selsey Tramway, ref1 Hunterston, ref1 Huskisson, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hyde Park, ref1 Immingham, ref1 Imperial Airways, ref1 India, ref1, ref2, ref3 Ingleton, ref1 innkeepers, ref1 InterCity, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 InterCity ref1 trains, ref2 interlocking, ref1, ref2 International Exhibition, ref1, ref2 Invergarry & Fort Augustus branch line, ref1 Invergordon, ref1 Inverness, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Ireland, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; first railways, ref7, ref8, ref9; potato famine, ref10, ref11; steamer services, ref12; railway network, ref13; railway gauge, ref14 Irish Mail, ref1, ref2, ref3 Irish Sea, ref1 Iron Times, ref1 Irwell, river, ref1, ref2 Isle of Wight, ref1, ref2 Italy, ref1 James, William, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Japan, ref1, ref2, ref3; bullet trains, ref4 Jellicoe Specials, ref1, ref2, ref3 Jessop, William, ref1, ref2 John O’Groats, ref1 joint stock companies, ref1 junctions, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; flat, ref5 Kelly, Phil, ref1 Kelvedon & Tollesbury Light Railway, ref1 Kemble, Fanny, ref1 Kent, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; and wartime, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Kent & East Sussex Railway, ref1 Kentish Town accident, ref1, ref2 Kenyon & Leigh Railway, ref1 Kete, John, ref1 Kew, ref1 Killingworth Colliery, ref1 Kilsby tunnel, ref1, ref2 King’s Cross station, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; Cambridge trains, ref8; access to, ref9; Great Northern Hotel, ref10, ref11; elegance, ref12, ref13; serves commuter lines, ref14; cemetery services, ref15; and railway races, ref16; and ‘Beer Trains’, ref17; smells, ref18; LNER services, ref19, ref20 Kinnaber Junction, ref1 Kitchener, Lord, ref1 Labour Party, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; and rail privatization, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Ladbroke Grove accident, ref1, ref2 Laing, Samuel, ref1 laissez-faire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Lake District, ref1 lamps, ref1 Lancashire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Lancaster, ref1 Land’s End, ref1 landowners, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Launceston, ref1 Lawson, Nigel, ref1 Lecount, Peter, ref1 Lee Navigation, ref1 Leeds, ref1, ref2; cotton industry, ref3; London services, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9; excursions, ref10; investors, ref11; railway access, ref12; station refurbishment, ref13; and electrification, ref14 Leeds & Selby Railway, ref1 Leeds Institute, ref1 Leicester, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Leigh & Bolton Railway, ref1 Letchworth Garden City, ref1 level crossings, ref1, ref2; keepers, ref3, ref4 Lewisham, ref1, ref2; accident, ref3 light railways, ref1 Light Railways Act, ref1, ref2 Lightfoot brothers, ref1 Lincoln, ref1 Lincolnshire, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 liners, ref1, ref2, ref3 liveries, ref1, ref2, ref3 Liverpool, ref1, ref2; and building of Liverpool & Manchester Railway, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; population, ref7; ban on locomotives, ref8, ref9; tunnel approach, ref10; cable-operated approach, ref11, ref12; and opening of Liverpool & Manchester Railway, ref13; railway connections, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18; and horse-races, ref19, ref20; and postal service, ref21; suburban railways, ref22; workmen’s trains, ref23; viaduct bombed, ref24; and electrification, ref25 Liverpool & Manchester Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10; double track, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14; surveys, ref15, ref16; costs, ref17, ref18; dividends and profits, ref19, ref20, ref21; gauge, ref22, ref23; choice of steam power and Rainhill trials, ref24; cable-operated section, ref25, ref26; opening, ref27, ref28, ref29; passenger services, ref30; tickets and fares, ref31; carriages, ref32; omnibus connections, ref33; goods services, ref34; mail services, ref35, ref36; track length, ref37, ref38, ref39; excursions, ref40; military transportation, ref41; amalgamation, ref42; telegraph system, ref43; working conditions, ref44; industrial relations, ref45 Liverpool Courier, ref1 Liverpool Mercury, ref1, ref2 Liverpool Overhead Railway, ref1 Liverpool Street station, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; Cambridge trains, ref5; building and cost, ref6, ref7; and electrification, ref8; collaboration with private sector, ref9; and Crossrail scheme, ref10 Liverpool Times, ref1 Llanelli, ref1 Llangynog-Llanrhaeadrym-Mochnant branch line, ref1 Lloyd George, David, ref1, ref2 Locke, Joseph, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; and Grand Junction Railway, ref5, ref6 Locomotion, ref1 Locomotion No. ref1, ref2 Locomotive Act (Red Flag Act), ref1 Locomotive Exchanges, ref1 locomotives: Duchess class, ref1; coal-burning, ref2; Crampton, ref3; captured by other companies, ref4; builders, ref5; care of, ref6; speed records, ref7, ref8; impact of war, ref9, ref10, ref11; Royal Scots class, ref12; Star and Saint classes, ref13; King and Castle classes, ref14, ref15; Southern, ref16; streamlining, ref17; Pacific class, ref18; investment in, ref19; post-war, ref20; private, ref21; diesel, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25; survival of steam, ref26, ref27, ref28; electric, ref29, ref30, ref31; Deltic diesels, ref32 London: first railway, ref1; first railway connections, ref2, ref3, ref4; suburbs, ref5, ref6, ref7; termini, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13; growth in railway connections, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20; suburban and commuter railways, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33; and postal service, ref34; time in, ref35; exhibition traffic, ref36, ref37, ref38; Midland Railway gains access, ref39; impact of railways, ref40, ref41; workmen’s trains, ref42; population growth, ref43; railway accidents, ref44; and Great Central connections, ref45; tramways, ref46; and wartime, ref47, ref48, ref49, ref50, ref51; and amalgamation, ref52, ref53; integrated transport system, ref54, ref55; wartime evacuation, ref56; and electrification, ref57 London & Birmingham Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; surveys, ref7; stagecoach connections, ref8; fares, ref9; investors, ref10; and royal travel, ref11; freight services, ref12; amalgamation, ref13, ref14; departure times, ref15; railway cottages, ref16 London & Chatham Railway, ref1, ref2 London & Croydon Railway, ref1 London & Greenwich Railway, ref1; right-hand running, ref2 London & North Eastern Railway (LNER), ref1, ref2, ref3; network, ref4; hotels, ref5; livery, ref6, ref7; accidents, ref8; rugby specials, ref9; food and drink, ref10; service improvements, ref11; publicity, ref12, ref13; profitability, ref14, ref15; split at nationalization, ref16; electrification, ref17 London & North Western Railway (LNWR), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7; dominant position, ref8; value and profitability, ref9; enters price war, ref10; and Midland Railway, ref11; and Welsh lines, ref12; and Irish services, ref13; sells coal, ref14; working hours, ref15; and route to Scotland, ref16; and railway races, ref17; braking system, ref18; Preston accident, ref19; modernization and improvements, ref20; Sunny South Special service, ref21; electrification, ref22; publicity, ref23; compensation claim, ref24; and amalgamation, ref25, ref26; livery, ref27 London & South Western Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; and railway races, ref5, ref6; reputation, ref7; electrification, ref8, ref9; consolidation, ref10; wartime service, ref11; and amalgamation, ref12, ref13 London & Southampton Railway, ref1 London Bridge station, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; collapse, ref5; Clayton tunnel accident, ref6; strike, ref7; Southern Belle service, ref8; electrification, ref9, ref10; and amalgamation, ref11, ref12 London, Chatham & Dover Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3 London Electric Railway, ref1, ref2 London, Midland & Scottish Railway (LMS), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5; network and inventory, ref6; livery, ref7; service improvements, ref8, ref9; publicity, ref10; workforce and repair facilities, ref11; profitability, ref12, ref13; and wartime, ref14, ref15 London Midland Region, ref1, ref2 London Necropolis Railway, ref1 London Passenger Transport Board, see London Transport London Post Office, ref1 London, Tilbury & Southend Railway, ref1 London Transport, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; headquarters, ref5 London Underground, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; Metropolitan Line, ref7, ref8; District Line, ref9, ref10; Circle Line, ref11, ref12; impact on shopping habits, ref13; and electrification, ref14; public relations, ref15; and wartime, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20; women on, ref21; Bakerloo Line, ref22; Piccadilly Line, ref23; increase in passengers, ref24; overcrowding, ref25; rails, ref26; see also Metropolitan District Railway; Metropolitan Railway London–York Direct Railway, ref1 Londonderry, ref1 looms, steam-powered, ref1 Lord’s cricket ground, ref1 lorries, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Lossiemouth, ref1 Loughborough, ref1 Louis Philippe, King, ref1 Louis XIV, ref1 Ludgate Hill station, ref1 Luton, ref1 Lutterworth, ref1 Macadam, John, ref1, ref2 Macclesfield, ref1 MacDonald, Ramsay, ref1 McGrath, Thomas, ref1 MacGregor, John, ref1, ref2 Macmillan, Harold, ref1 Maglev trains, ref1 Maiden Lane station, ref1 Maidenhead, ref1 Maidenhead Bridge, ref1 Maidstone, ref1 mail order goods, ref1 mail services, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Major, John, ref1, ref2, ref3 Mallaig, ref1 Mallard, ref1 Manchester, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; steam-powered looms, ref7; and building of Liverpool & Manchester Railway, ref8, ref9; population, ref10; indifference to railway, ref11; weavers, ref12; railway connections, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22; investment in railways, ref23; and excursions, ref24, ref25; railway access, ref26; workmen’s trains, ref27; and railway races, ref28; Great Central connections, ref29, ref30; and electrification, ref31 Manchester & Birmingham Railway, ref1 Manchester & Leeds Railway, ref1, ref2 Manchester & Sheffield Railway, ref1 Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Marlborough, ref1 Marly, gardens of, ref1 Marples, Ernest, ref1, ref2, ref3 Marsh, Richard, ref1, ref2 marshalling yards, ref1, ref2 Marylebone Cricket Club, ref1 Marylebone station, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Mayhew, Henry, ref1 Meakin, George, ref1 Mechanics’ Institutes, ref1 Mendips, ref1 Merchant Navy, ref1 Mercury, ref1 Merstham, ref1 Merthyr Tydfil, ref1 Metroland, ref1 Metropolitan District Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Metropolitan Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; introduces Pullman service, ref7; profitability, ref8; and Great Central Railway, ref9; and amalgamation, ref10 middle classes, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Middlesbrough, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Middlesex, ref1, ref2, ref3 Middleton Colliery, ref1 Mid-Kent Railway, ref1 Midland Counties Railway, ref1, ref2 Midland Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; enters price war, ref7; access to London, ref8; promotes third class, ref9, ref10; and Irish services, ref11; Pullman service, ref12; industrial relations, ref13; and Settle & Carlisle line, ref14, ref15, ref16; braking system, ref17; coal trains, ref18; and wartime, ref19, ref20; and amalgamation, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24 Milford Haven, ref1 military trains, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 milk, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Milne, Sir James, ref1 Milton Keynes, ref1 mines, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Molesworth, Sir William, ref1 Monmouthshire, ref1 Monmouthshire Railway and Canal Company, ref1 monopolies, ref1; Huish and, ref2, ref3; Victorian fear of, ref4, ref5; privatization and, ref6 monorails, ref1, ref2 ‘monster trains’, ref1 Moon, Sir Richard, ref1, ref2 Morecambe Bay, ref1 Moretonhampstead, ref1 Moreton-in-the-Marsh, ref1 Morning Post, ref1 Morrison, Herbert, ref1 Morton, Sir Alastair, ref1 Motherwell, ref1 motorways, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Mumbles, ref1 munitions trains, ref1, ref2, ref3 Myers Flat swamp, ref1, ref2 Napoleon Bonaparte, ref1 narrow gauge railways, ref1, ref2, ref3 National Rail Enquiry Service, ref1, ref2 National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 National Wages Board, ref1 nationalization, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6; opposition to, ref7, ref8, ref9; and amalgamation, ref10, ref11, ref12; and industrial relations, ref13 navvies, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; deaths of, ref5, ref6, ref7; shipped to Crimea, ref8 Nesham’s Colliery, ref1 Network Rail, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Network SouthEast, ref1, ref2, ref3 New Southgate, ref1 New Zealand, ref1 Newbury, ref1, ref2 Newcastle, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; London services, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10; Tyne bridges, ref11; wartime evacuation, ref12 Newcastle & Carlisle Railway, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; freight services, ref5 Newcastle & Darlington Railway, ref1 Newcastle Courant, ref1 ‘Newcastle Roads’, ref1 Newcomen, John, ref1 Newington Green, ref1 Newport, ref1 newspaper specials, ref1 newspapers (press), ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4; and railway advertising, ref5, ref6; and railway races, ref7; and rail strike, ref8; Southern Railway campaign, ref9; opposition to nationalization, ref10; switch to road haulage, ref11; opposition to privatization, ref12 Newton, ref1, ref2 Newton Abbot, ref1, ref2 Newtown, ref1 night traffic, ref1 Nightall, Jim, ref1 Nock, O.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

By ‘technology’ I do not mean all technology, of course. The word itself (like ‘democracy’) came from an amalgamation of two Greek words – techne, meaning ‘skill’ and logos meaning ‘study’ – and therefore encompasses practically everything in the modern world. I am not referring to the lathe, the power-loom, the motor car, the MRI scanner or the F16 fighter jet. I mean specifically the digital technologies associated with Silicon Valley – social media platforms, big data, mobile technology and artificial intelligence – that are increasingly dominating economic, political and social life. It’s clear that these technologies have, on balance, made us more informed, wealthier and, in some ways, happier.

The Naked Eye: How the Revolution of Laser Surgery Has Unshackled the Human Eye
by Gerard Sutton and Michael Lawless
Published 15 Nov 2013

Even then Sato recognised that the cornea – the front surface of the eye – was the key and that a surgeon needed to change its shape if he was going to repair the patient’s short-sightedness. “The great creators – the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors – stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anaesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.” Ayn Rand Sato’s procedure was very successful at first, but within a year or so, disaster struck. His work predated medical knowledge of the importance of the inside layer of the cornea.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

A famous print entitled ‘The Distinguished Men of Science of Great Britain Living in the Year 1807–8’, the year that Parliament abolished the slave trade, depicts fifty-one great engineers and scientists all alive at the time – as if they were gathered together by an artist in the library of the Royal Institution. Here are the men who made canals (Thomas Telford), tunnels (Marc Brunel), steam engines (James Watt), locomotives (Richard Trevithick), rockets (William Congreve), hydraulic presses (Joseph Bramah); men who invented the machine tool (Henry Maudslay), the power loom (Edmund Cartwright), the factory (Matthew Boulton), the miner’s lamp (Humphry Davy) and the smallpox vaccine (Edward Jenner). Here are astronomers like Nevil Maskelyne and William Herschel, physicists like Henry Cavendish and Count Rumford, chemists like John Dalton and William Henry, botanists like Joseph Banks, polymaths like Thomas Young, and many more.

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The British pioneers of industrial textile manufacture largely failed in their attempts to use trade secrecy laws to protect themselves. Though customs officers searched foreigners’ possessions for plans of machinery, New Englanders like Francis Cabot Lowell sauntered innocently about the mills of Lancashire and Scotland ostensibly for his health while frantically memorising the details of Cartwright power looms, which he promptly copied on his return to Massachusetts. The dye industry relied mostly on secrecy till the 1860s when analytical chemistry reached the point where rivals could find out how dyes were made; it then turned to patents. Or, second, you can capture the first-mover advantage, as Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, did throughout his career.

Status Anxiety
by Alain de Botton
Published 1 Jan 2004

Thanks to new farming techniques (including crop rotation, scientific stock breeding and land consolidation), yields began to increase sharply. Between 1700 and 1820, Britain’s agricultural productivity doubled, releasing capital and manpower that flowed into the cities to be invested in industry and trade. The invention of the steam engine and the cotton power loom modified not only working practices but social expectations. Towns exploded in size. In 1800, only one city in the British Isles, London, could boast a population of more than a hundred thousand; by 1891, twenty-three English cities would make that claim. Goods and services that had formerly been the exclusive preserve of the elite were made available to the masses.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 4 Mar 2003

By 1914, Japan was investing about a tenth of its GNP abroad—a good deal of it in the form of direct investment in China (particularly Manchuria).12 Trading companies such as Mitsui opened branches in China from the late 1870s onward. In 1902, Mitsui started a fashion for building cotton plants in China. Ten years later, the Japanese owned 886 power looms in China, even more than the British.13 The Japanese also tiptoed into the United States. As early as 1881, fourteen Japanese trading companies had branches in New York.14 Three trading companies later opened offices in Texas to handle their cotton business.15 In 1892, Kikkoman built a factory in Denver, Colorado, to make soy sauce for Japanese immigrants.16 Many nineteenth-century multinationals—particularly the European ones—were bound up with imperialism, though never quite to the extent of the East India Company.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Published 5 Mar 2019

Moving ones and zeros around on an electronic exchange requires class power just as much as storming barricades does. The agents of progressive change—those who might push for and carry out a sweeping socialization of investment—are far removed from the centers of financial capitalism. On its own, an investment algorithm can no more dig capitalism’s grave today than a power loom could in the nineteenth century. Both are inanimate tools created by capitalism that open up new possibilities for socialists who hope to transform the world in the interests of the many, but these tools are nothing without organized political forces ready to put them to more useful ends. What kinds of transitional demands could such forces make to hasten future socialization?

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
by Arthur Herman
Published 27 Nov 2001

Thousands found employment in eastern seaboard cities, where their job skills, along with their frugal work habits, made them popular with employers. As early as the 1790s the incipient American industrial base came to rely on Scottish engineers, mechanics, and workers to set up its cotton mills, maintain and repair its steam-engine pumps, and operate its power looms. A textile worker from Paisley quickly discovered that he or she could work the same hours in a factory in Massachusetts and earn far more money, with a lower cost of living. This is what emigration guidebooks meant when they said North America was “the best poor man’s country” because “the price of grain is very low and the price of labor very high.”

…

He was also a committed Radical and a correspondent with the English reformer William Cobbett, and published numerous articles in Cobbett’s Political Register. From the one grandfather Carnegie learned his own egalitarian politics, summed up in the Scottish Radicals’ motto, “Death to privilege.” From the other he got his sense of optimism and intellectual energy, as well as a belief in education as the foundation of democracy. In 1848 new power looms driven by Watt’s steam engine were replacing the old hand looms, so the Carnegie family left for America. Andrew was twelve when they settled in the former Fort Pitt at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, which had been renamed Pittsburgh. The town was a magnet for Scots looking for work in the coal mines, iron foundries, and lumber mills that were transforming Pittsburgh into the industrial workshop of the upper Mid-Atlantic.

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines
by Richard Heinberg and James Howard (frw) Kunstler
Published 1 Sep 2007

We are not the first people to feel this way: criticism of technology has a history. The Luddites of early 19th-century England were among the first to raise their voices — and hammers! — against the dehumanizing side effects of mechanization. As industrialization proceeded decade-by-decade — from powered looms to steam shovels, jet planes, and electric toothbrushes — objections to the accelerating, mindless adoption of new technologies waxed erudite. During the past century, books by Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Kirkpatrick Sale, Stephanie Mills, Chellis Glendinning, Jerry Mander, John Zerzan, and Derrick Jensen, among others, have helped generations of readers understand how and why our tools have come to enslave us, colonizing our minds as well as our daily routines.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

Their leader is a charismatic young cropper by the name of George Mellor. He raises his long pistol – brought from Russia, some say – up high for all to see. Their target is Rawfolds Mill, a factory owned by one William Cartwright. A wealthy businessman, Cartwright has just introduced a new type of power-loom that can do the work of four skilled weavers. Since then, unemployment among the Yorkshire Luddites, as these masked men call themselves, has soared. But Cartwright has been tipped off. He has called in soldiers, and they are lying in wait. Twenty minutes, 140 bullets, and two deaths later, Mellor and his men are forced to retreat.

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
by Satya Nadella , Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols
Published 25 Sep 2017

But I believe that to create and manage innovations we cannot fathom today, we will need increased investment in education to attain higher level thinking and more equitable education outcomes. Developing the knowledge and skills needed to implement new technologies on a large scale is a difficult social problem that will take a long time to resolve. The power loom was invented in 1810 but took thirty-five years to transform the clothing industry because of shortages of trained mechanics. CREATIVITY—One of the most coveted human skills is creativity, and this won’t change. Machines will enrich and augment our creativity, but the human drive to create will remain central.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 28 Sep 2014

A hundred times more accurate than its predecessors—losing or gaining only a minute or so a week—the pendulum clock brought about a change in the perception of time that we still live with today. Drawing of the pendulum clock designed by Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher Galileo Galilei, 1638–1659. — WHEN WE THINK ABOUT the technology that created the industrial revolution, we naturally conjure up the thunderous steam engines and steam-powered looms. But beneath the cacophony of the mills, a softer but equally important sound was everywhere: the ticking of pendulum clocks, quietly keeping time. Imagine some alternative history where, for whatever reason, timekeeping technology lags behind the development of the other machines that catalyzed the industrial age.

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet
by Jane Gleeson-White
Published 14 May 2011

But in fact his system was no more than a cumbersome, complex version of Pacioli’s and has been summarised as follows: instead of two columns in the ledger, make ten; and then in all essential points proceed as directed by Pacioli. Jones and his claims for the labour-saving virtues of his system were so persuasive they almost undid his book’s potential success: in an era of rioting provoked by the introduction of labour-replacing machinery such as the power loom and the spinning jenny, the public worried that the purported efficiency of Jones’s system—‘the most extensively useful invention which had ever made its appearance’—would put bookkeepers out of work. Once Jones had reassured them that no such thing would happen, that no jobs would be lost through the adoption of his system, his book, ‘by unblushing impudence’, went on to find phenomenal success.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

They also supervised this labor force closely, lest anyone slow down production. And they paid low wages. Workers complained about conditions and the backbreaking effort. Most egregious to many were the rules they had to follow in factories. One weaver put it this way in 1834: “No man would like to work in a power-loom, they do not like it, there is such a clattering and noise it would almost make some men mad; and next, he would have to be subject to a discipline that a hand-loom weaver can never submit to.” New machinery turned workers into mere cogs. As another weaver testified before a parliamentary committee in April 1835, “I am determined for my part, that if they will invent machines to supersede manual labour, they must find iron boys to mind them.”

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Data on income and consumption are from Allen (2009a), and hours worked are from Voth (2012, including Table 4.8, 317). The cotton industry historical details are from Beckert (2014). We also draw on de Vries (2008). The history of military drill is from Lockhart (2021). Arkwright’s factory and his career are discussed in Freeman (2018). The folk ballad “So, come all you cotton-weavers…” is “Hand-Loom v. Power-Loom,” by John Grimshaw, published in Harland (1882, 189); it is also quoted in Thompson (1966, 306), though with a typo. “I have had seven boys…” is on 186, paragraph 2643, of the Report from Select Committee on Hand-Loom Weavers’ Petitions, published July 1, 1835, House of Commons, testimony of John Scott on April 11, 1835.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

Lev argues that the 500-year-old discipline, invented by the 14th-century Venetian mathematician Luca PacioH, is simply inadequate to the ineffable glories of 21st-century capitalism.Today, knowledge, not things, rule. That's a fashionable point of view that assumes our ancestors were dolts, as if the wheel and the power loom weren't productive embodiments of knowledge. Things get interesting when Lev gets specific. He thinks financial statements should recognize four kinds of New Era assets: (1) "assets associated with product innovation," which presumably includes everything from a new microprocessor to a new kind of cereal; (2) "assets that are associated with a company's brand," which let a company sell its products or services at a higher price than its competitors; (3) "structural assets"—not flashy innovations but better, smarter, difierent ways of doing business that can set a company apart from its competitors; and (4) "monopolies, companies that enjoy a franchise, or have substantial sunk costs that a competitor would have to match, or have a barrier to entry that it can use to its advantage."

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

For centuries, the average real wage and standard of living had stagnated, while almost a billion people struggled against the harsh realities of daily life. Suddenly, in the early 1800s, just a few years after the American Revolution and the publication of The Wealth of Nations, the Western world began to flourish as never before. The spin-ning jenny, power looms, and the steam engine were the first of many inventions that saved time and money for enterprising businessmen and the average citizen. The Industrial Revolution was beginning to unfold, real wages started climbing, and everyone's standard of living, rich and poor, began rising to unforeseen heights.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
by Michael Harris
Published 6 Aug 2014

It turns out that the original nineteenth-century Luddites were hardly “Luddites” in our contemporary sense at all. We think of such people as being rabidly and unthinkingly anti-technology. But in fact the Luddites of Nottingham, and Lancashire, and Yorkshire—the textile workers who attacked the “power loom” in 1811 and beyond—were socialist revolutionaries, a group of workers who fought against crippling pay cuts, child labor, and changes to laws that had protected their livelihoods. They were fighting not against technology, but for fair treatment at the hands of a manufacturing elite. As Neil Postman has it: “The historical Luddites were neither childish nor naïve.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy
by Jeremias Prassl
Published 7 May 2018

Duncan Bythell agrees: So long as outwork labour remained plentiful and its price fell ever lower, manu- facturers had little incentive to turn to alternative means of production . . . contem- poraries often believed that the very cheapness of hand-labour actually delayed the adoption of newly invented labour-saving machines. (Duncan Bythell, The Sweated Trades: Outwork in Nineteenth-Century Britain (St Martin’s Press 1978), 177) The example given is the development of power looms in the textile industry in the 1830s and 1840s, with manufacturers reporting before parliamentary com- mittees that low labour cost made it unnecessary to invest. There are also more recent examples, such as agricultural innovation in California in the 1970s: Eduardo Porter, ‘Revisiting a minimum-wage axiom’, The New York Times (4 February 2007), http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/business/yourmoney/ 04view.html, archived at https://perma.cc/5JG4-F22A.

The Enlightened Capitalists
by James O'Toole
Published 29 Dec 2018

Not surprisingly, he wanted to play a part in the exhilarating technological and business changes going on around him. By the time he was eighteen, he was junior partner in a firm that manufactured the latest technologies of the era—such as Arkwright’s water frame, Hargreaves’s spinning jenny, Crompton’s mule, and Edmund Cartwright’s power loom—all used in the production of high-quality cotton cloth. He soon went off on his own and established himself as a successful self-employed businessman. But he was ambitious, and when he read a notice soliciting applicants for the post of factory manager at a large mill, he applied. He went in person to meet the mill’s owner, a wealthy merchant and manufacturer named Drinkwater.

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H., 27 Taylor, Frederick W., 430 Taylorism, 81, 106–7 Tesla Motors, 460 Texas Instruments (TI), 257 textile mills Britain’s exports of cloth and, 4–5 child labor, 5 child labor in, 4–5 closing of British, 1806, 14 creation of wealth and, 4 Defoe’s description, 4 “immiseration” of mill workers, 5 J&J’s cotton mill, 148 Johnson advocates minimum wage, 151 living conditions of workers, 5 Owen’s reforms at New Lanark mills, 6–30 power loom, 9 spinning jenny, 4, 9 spinning mule, 4, 9 water frame, 4, 9 Thatcher, Margaret, 435–36 Theory Y, 431 Thigpen, Peter, 191, 192 Santone factory closing and, 198–99 Thompson, J. Walter, 146 Time magazine, on Bradshaw, 305 Tindell, Kip, 455 Tinker, Grant, 311 Tisch, Laurence, 311–12 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 395–96 Tom’s of Maine, 360–75, 432 Colgate-Palmolive Company buys controlling interest in, 371–75, 392, 395 community relations, 362, 365, 366, 370, 371, 374 company credo, 363, 365 company ownership and, 365, 368, 369–70 company’s mission, 362–64 “corporate tithing,” 364–65, 366, 372 education on values and priorities, 363 employees, 365, 366, 372 environmental practices, 360, 367, 368 expansion and growth, 361, 364–67 future of, 374–75 hiring women and minorities, 364 need for capital, 369–70, 374 participative management, 367 product recall, 364, 369 products, 367 recycling and, 367 size of, late 1980s, 364 Townsend, Claire, 285, 286 Townsend, Joan Tours, 280, 285 Townsend, Robert “Bob,” 264, 279–87, 427, 428, 436, 477 American Express and, 280, 282 as Avis head, 281, 282, 283–84 background and personal life, 280 Bennis on, 286–87 business philosophy at Avis, 281 commercial slogan for Avis, 279 death of, 286 ethics and, 285 fighting unionization, 284 humanistic philosophy of management, 284 influence of, 286–87 intellectual influences on, 430 ITT acquires Avis, 284–85 life after Avis, 285–87 long-term thinking and, 281–82 “management by adultery,” 286 “Operation Mars,” 280 organizational “guerrilla warfare” and, 282–85 Radica and, 285–86 Up the Organization, 279–80, 283, 285, 286 “Trees” (Kilmer), 148 Trillin, Calvin, 382 Trollope, Anthony, 282 Truman, Harry, xvi Trump, Donald, 278, 467, 489n TRW, 424 “Try Reality” (Johnson), 150–51 “Two and a Half Cheers for Conscious Capitalism” (O’Toole and Vogel), 454, 455–56 Uber, 473, 474, 475 UN Global Compact, 451 Unilever.

Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto
by Mark Helprin
Published 19 Apr 2009

To wit, just as accusing someone of being a communist, or an anti-communist, so as to skate over the substance of his arguments is (or was) a common tactic, so in regard to anything having to do with mechanization the easiest reflex is to brand an opponent a Luddite. That is, someone who, like the early-nineteenth-century craftsmen who destroyed the powered looms threatening their way of life (and were severely repressed for doing so), rashly and irrationally fights the inevitable and the good. What most damns the Luddites in the common wisdom is that they failed to make distinctions (although they did: they did not attack machines per se, but only those that were displacing their customary industry), not even bothering with the bath water as they threw out all the babies.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

Married couples with children are on the job an extra 413 hours, or an extra ten weeks a year, combined.23 Adding salt to the wounds, the United States is the only industrialized nation where employers are not required by law to provide workers any paid vacation time.24 The reason the prophecies of Mills and Keynes never came to pass is obvious but too often overlooked: new technologies do not emerge in a vacuum free of social, political, and economic influences. Context is all-important. On their own, labor-saving machines, however ingenious, are not enough to bring about a society of abundance and leisure, as the Luddites who destroyed the power looms set to replace them over two centuries ago knew all too well. If we want to see the fruits of technological innovation widely shared, it will require conscious effort and political struggle. Ultimately, outcomes are shaped as much by the capabilities of new technologies as by the wider circumstances in which they operate.

The Ages of Globalization
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Published 2 Jun 2020

We are endangering the planet in ways we have never done before, without a guidebook on how to move forward. The Challenge of Inequality Technological advances contain within them the seeds of rising inequality, as new technologies create winners and losers in the marketplace. The advent of the spinning jenny and power loom displaced and impoverished multitudes of spinners and weavers in India. The mechanization of agriculture impoverished countless smallholder farmers around the world who desperately fled to the cities to find a livelihood. The introduction of robots on the assembly lines of automobile plants have created unemployment and falling wages for workers laid off from those factories.

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together
by Nick Polson and James Scott
Published 14 May 2018

In America, jobless claims kept hitting new lows from 2010 through 2017, even as AI and automation gained steam as economic forces. The pace of robotic automation has been even more relentless in China, yet wages there have been soaring for years. That doesn’t mean AI hasn’t threatened individual people’s jobs. It has, and it will continue to do so, just as the power loom threatened the jobs of weavers, and just as the car threatened the jobs of buggy whips. New technologies always change the mix of labor needed in the economy, putting downward pressure on wages in some areas and upward pressure in others. AI will be no different, and we strongly support job-training and social-welfare programs to provide meaningful help for those displaced by technology.

The Mind Is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind
by Nick Chater
Published 28 Mar 2018

It is a continual source of amazement to us that tasks that seemed to require the full power of human ingenuity can be solved, often far more efficiently, by processes of standardization and mechanization: the flexibility and dexterity of human hand-weaving could, in many cases, be replaced by the precision achieved by the hand-loom, and then the steam-driven Jacquard loom, controlled by punched cards around 1800, and on to the phenomenal productivity of the computerized power looms of today. At each step, the environment is made more precise and more standardized; and more of the task can be handed over to machines. In the same way, the rise of digitization and big data can create an ever more frictionless and more precisely defined world in which computers can operate far better than we can.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

What set cotton apart was not practical matters of cost and comfort but rather the more ethereal trends of fashion. “The spectacular early triumph of cotton depended most of all on its visual, decorative, fashionable qualities,” Styles writes. “Where appearance was crucial, cotton succeeded. Where utilitarian durability counted, cotton sometimes lagged behind.” W G Taylor’s Power Loom and Patent Calico Machine A few perceptive individuals at the time were able to see beyond the Calico Madam protectionist outrage and detect the deeper trends lying beneath the craze for cotton. The economist and financial speculator Nicholas Barbon observed in his 1690 work, A Discourse of Trade: “It is not Necessity that causeth the Consumption.

Emergence
by Steven Johnson

It was impossible to see it at the time, but Manchester—and indeed the entire Lancashire region—had planted itself at the very center of a technological and commercial revolution that would irrevocably alter the future of the planet. Manchester lay at the confluence of several world-historical rivers: the nascent industrial technologies of steam-powered looms; the banking system of commercial London; the global markets and labor pools of the British Empire. The story of that convergence has been told many times, and the debate over its consequences continues to this day. But beyond the epic effects that it had on the global economy, the industrial takeoff that occurred in Manchester between 1700 and 1850 also created a new kind of city, one that literally exploded into existence.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

That sentiment could equally have come from Sakichi Toyoda (1867–1930), founder of the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, the great industrial entrepreneur who remains something of a national hero in Japan. Often referred to as the father of the Japanese industrial revolution and the Japanese Thomas Edison, Toyoda, the son of a poor carpenter, was a pioneer in automation, inventing an internationally competitive power loom that would immediately cease production if it detected an error. Such radical innovation in a developing country is an extraordinary achievement. In the catch-up phase of industrialisation, high rates of growth are usually generated by following the example of more developed countries without necessarily fostering radical domestic innovation.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 1 Jan 2010

The auto industry cannot expand without more steel inputs, plastic and electronic components and rubber tyres, nor, incidentally, will its expansion make sense unless there are highways to drive on. Technological innovations in one part of what we now call a ‘commodity’ or ‘supply chain’ flowing into production invariably render necessary innovations elsewhere. Rising productivity in the nineteenth-century cotton industry with the advent of the power loom, Marx points out, required innovations in cotton production (the cotton gin), transport and communications, chemical and industrial dyeing techniques, and the like. The conversion of a part of yesterday’s profit into fresh capital depends, therefore, on the availability of an ever-increasing quantity of means of production, as well as an increasing quantity of wage goods to feed the extra workers to be employed.

Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization
by Paul Kindstedt
Published 31 Mar 2012

However, during the first decades of the nineteenth century, a number of prominent New England merchants who had amassed great wealth through the rum and slave trades of the eighteenth century invested in new industrial textile manufacturing equipment and infrastructure: water-powered yarn-spinning machines, power looms, and mill facilities. These well-capitalized New England mills produced cotton textiles, the demand for which was virtually inexhaustible. Consequently, the number and size of New England textile factories grew quickly and the mills soon became the backbone of the southern New England economy. The booming textile mills, in turn, created new employment opportunities and spurred the growth of mill towns, which shifted the demographics of southern New England from rural farming communities to urban centers and created new local markets for New England cheese and butter.

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
by Kai-Fu Lee
Published 14 Sep 2018

Broadly speaking, this change in the mode of production was one of deskilling. These factories took tasks that once required high-skilled workers (for example, handcrafting textiles) and broke the work down into far simpler tasks that could be done by low-skilled workers (operating a steam-driven power loom). In the process, these technologies greatly increased the amount of these goods produced and drove down prices. In terms of employment, early GPTs enabled process innovations like the assembly line, which gave thousands—and eventually hundreds of millions—of former farmers a productive role in the new industrial economy.

Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy
by Michael Knox Beran
Published 2 Aug 2021

For if the Episcopal Church and the New England prep school promoted the Gilded Age marriage of pedigreed blood and plutocratic cash over which Morgan presided, New York was, more often than not, the scene of the actual consummation. Boston, with its hieratic cruelties and its “cold roast” manners, stood aloof from these déclassé transactions and so gradually lost ground. The Lowells, Appletons, and Lawrences of Boston’s State Street had been pioneers of modern capitalism, speculating in power looms on the Merrimac River at a time when Wall Street was drowsing over beaver pelts and buffalo skins. The problem was that Boston’s nobility was hardly less blood-proud than the Roman patriciate that produced Julius Caesar and Sulla Felix: it looked upon a “man without ancestors” who aspired to the highest honors as “a scandal and a pollution.”

…

She, too, turned on the gas. And there was Mr. Dimiceli, an electrician from Sicily who had lost his job. His family was “listening to the radio in the apartment of the woman below” when the youngest Dimiceli boy, coming up the stairs, “heard a shot from their own apartment.” In Lawrence, Massachusetts, where the power looms established in the 1840s by Abbott Lawrence and his partners in the Essex Company had paid dividends to generations of WASPs, Wilson found “hunger and cold and fatigue and hopelessness.” The textile companies had announced a ten percent wage cut, and the workers struck. “The poverty of their homes is wretched,” Wilson wrote.

Early Retirement Extreme
by Jacob Lund Fisker
Published 30 Sep 2010

Real world examples of something that is simple but tightly coupled includes most technology, as "simple and tightly coupled" is almost the definition of technology or a tool. Examples of industry thus comprise Industrialism 1.0, with its heavy, centralized engines--that is, dams, water supply and waste water treatment, many conveyer belt systems, power looms, printing presses, and so on, down to most consumer technology. In short, these can all be stopped by throwing a switch, but their stoppage will not begin to affect other systems. The reader may note that those tool or cog-like qualities are actually ideal for a work force, though not for the individuals themselves, many of whom have little control over their work and are just one paycheck away from being unable to pay rent or put food on the table.

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch
by Lewis Dartnell
Published 15 Apr 2014

Not only does this innovation allow the weaver to work on a much wider swath of warp fibers, it also greatly accelerates the weaving process and allows the loom to become entirely mechanized, powered by a waterwheel, steam engine, or electric motor, thereby enabling a single weaver to attend to many machines simultaneously. Early power looms could complete a weft row every second, and modern machines convey the weft across the loom more than over 60 miles per hour. As well as producing food and clothing for yourself, a top priority will be restoring the supply of all the natural and derived substances that are crucial for supporting civilization.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

Wages may adjust; occupations may change in character, for better or worse; some jobs may evolve into something else; some may be replaced by others; some technological and organisational changes may induce more work and labour.21 One of the unsung effects of occupational disruption is, as we shall see, a transfer of rental income from professions and crafts to those who own the technological apparatus. A once popular theory known as ‘Kondratieff long waves’ states that every sixty years or so the production structure is transformed by a technological revolution based on some marvellous invention: the water mill in the thirteenth century; the printing press in the late fifteenth century; the power loom and the steam engine in the eighteenth; the steel industry and electricity in the late nineteenth; and the car and Fordist mass production in the early twentieth. While there is little support for Kondratieff’s precise theory, clearly there have been periods of breakthroughs interspersed with periods of relative stability.

The Rapture of the Nerds
by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
Published 3 Sep 2012

“Aaaugh,” says Huw as the full force of the post-party cultural hangover hits him between the eyes, right beneath the biohazard trefoil, and the coffee hits his stomach. “Need fresh air now ...” * * * Huw makes sure to wake up in his own bed the next morning. It’s ancient and creaky, the springs bowed to conform to his anatomy, and he wove the blankets himself on the treadle-powered loom in the back parlor that Mum and Dad left him when they ascended, several decades before. (Huw is older than he looks, thanks to an unasked-for inheritance of chromosomal hackery, and has for the most part become set in his ways: incurious and curmudgeonly. He has his reasons.) His alarm clock is a sundial sketched on the whitewashed wall opposite in bold lines of charcoal, slightly smudged; his lifestyle a work of wabi in motion.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens
by A. N. Wilson
Published 3 Jun 2020

The magnetic property of iron was no longer a mystery – it was something that could be demonstrated and explained in terms of chemistry and physics. From H2O to steam engines was a short step: within decades of the chemists’ theoretical studies there were mechanized factories; the Luddites were trying to put back the clock and destroy the spinning jenny and the powered loom; and railroads were steaming across the fields and plains of Europe and America. A new world had dawned. Mesmer believed it was possible to explain and categorize the human psyche in rather the way that it was possible to classify the inanimate universe. His ‘discovery’ of animal magnetism led to two propositions.

How the Post Office Created America: A History
by Winifred Gallagher
Published 7 Jan 2016

These skilled detective-clerks did not read the letters but strove earnestly to get their contents, which amounted to millions of dollars per year, to the rightful recipients. They successfully redirected a letter addressed only to “Dr. Washburn, Roberts College,” and an accompanying $1,000 check, to him at an institution not in the United States but in Constantinople (today, Istanbul), Turkey. They forwarded another letter, sent to “Mr. James Gunn, Power-Loom Shuttle Maker, Mass., America,” to the addressee in Lowell, Massachusetts, a center of the textile industry. At a time when many people were phonetic spellers, one clerk was even able to translate “Reikzhieer, Stiejt Kanedeka” as Roxbury, State of Connecticut. Some curiosities that remained in limbo ended up in the Dead Letter Office’s museum, a major attraction that suggested the startling range of arcana that circulated in the mail, from loaded pistols to butterfly cocoons.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

Now, millions of PCs around the world, each one of them thousands of times more powerful than the time-sharing mainframes of the ’60s, connect via the Internet. As the individual computers participating in online swarms become more numerous and powerful and the speed of information transfer among them increases, an expansion of raw computing power looms, an expansion of such magnitude that it will certainly make possible qualitative changes in the way people use computers. Peer-to-peer sociotechnical cooperatives amplify the power of the other parts of the smart mobs puzzle. Peer-to-peer collectives, pervasive computing, social networks, and mobile communications multiply each other’s effects: Not only are millions of people now linking their social networks through mobile communication devices, but the computing chips inside those mobile devices are growing capable of communicating with radio-linked chips embedded in the environment.

Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together
by Thomas W. Malone
Published 14 May 2018

In this chapter, we’ll see how a collective-intelligence perspective can shed some light on these questions and show us that there is probably less to worry about than you might think. WILL A ROBOT TAKE YOUR JOB? Since long before the Industrial Revolution, we humans have been inventing machines that do things humans used to do. And for at least the past 200 years, people have worried about these machines taking away human jobs. In the early 1800s, as power looms eliminated jobs previously held by human weavers, industrial activists called Luddites burned factories and destroyed machinery in protest.1 In the 1960s, as computers eliminated large numbers of clerical jobs in the back offices of banks and insurance companies, President Lyndon Johnson created a National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress to study the problem.2 And in the 2010s, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (see here) have warned about the risks of artificial intelligence putting many humans out of work, not just in blue-collar and clerical jobs but in white-collar jobs, too.3 But people have consistently underestimated the ability of the superminds we call markets to adapt to changes like these.

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
by Carl Zimmer
Published 9 Mar 2021

The sect was made up of philosophers, naturalists, and physicians who believed that life contains some sort of vital force. These so-called vitalists carried on the fight against Descartes, despite the many victories that his mechanical vision scored in the eighteenth century. Inventors built steamboats, air compressors, power looms, and other devices that would make the industrial revolution possible. Astronomers who treated nature as matter in motion made new discoveries of their own, such as the planet Uranus. But the vitalists pushed back, arguing that life was fundamentally different from a planet or a steamboat. The vital force endowed matter with self-directed motion and the power to generate new complex bodies.

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
Published 14 Sep 2021

She reported that her mother had shoved her away when she was just learning, told her to find her own abalone, and “practically screamed at me to move OFF and find my danged abalone BY MYSELF.”11 In cultures and situations as varied as those of the Japanese women, hunting by the Siberian Yukaghir, and the operation of power looms by 20th-century Guatemalan Maya, the skills are learned with no direct instruction. In all of these cases, teaching is not just absent, but strenuously avoided.12 In light of the relative rarity of teaching both in other species and among other human cultures, we should be asking ourselves: What do we need to learn in order to become our best selves?

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy
by David Hale and Lyric Hughes Hale
Published 23 May 2011

A group of Iranian economists recently estimated that the flow of Iranian investments to Dubai alone was approximately $260 billion in 2006–2008. Iranian investors, with very few options as to where they can invest, seem to now be going to Malaysia in droves. If the possibility of a confrontation with Iran and any other powers looms large, it will be very hard for Dubai (or other members of the UAE, for that matter) to rebuild credibility with international investors and continue to play a significant global role financially. An effective solution to the Afghanistan and Pakistan dilemmas is unimaginable without the involvement of India and Iran.

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Jun 2017

The period witnessed what must have felt at the time like unprecedented change and confusion: the onset of industrialisation, political revolution and counter-revolution, great leaps in science, the first railways (which changed people’s conception of ‘the nation’), war, state-building and mass urbanisation. A British prime minister was assassinated. Luddites smashed machines, fearing that the power loom—that generation’s artificial intelligence—would cause mass unemployment. The turmoil and instability shook up old assumptions as never before, stimulating a flowering of radical ideas, some of which were stirrings of the modern world: working-class consciousness, extended (albeit still limited) suffrage, Factory Acts, socialist theory, Robert Owen’s New Lanark, Catholic emancipation and utilitarian dreams.* It was a time when people had outgrown the institutions of the day, but had not yet found new ones.

Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack
by Steve Twomey
Published 1 Nov 2016

That is why it is an outpost, so that people on the Mainland can go to sleep.” Earlier Saturday, a navy whaleboat had eased away from the officer’s landing in Southeast Loch and made for the battleship California. It carried a piece of paper and Edwin Layton. The early morning was soothing, with scattered clouds; the warship ahead was beautiful, powerful, looming larger as the launch closed the gap. The California flew the flag of Admiral Pye, the second-highest-ranking officer in the fleet and somewhat of a consigliore to Kimmel, who wanted Pye’s opinion about the paper Layton carried. It was a message from Manila, from Admiral Hart, who was eighteen and a half hours deeper into Saturday than was Oahu.

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
by Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman
Published 2 Jan 1980

Taxes are, in effect, imposed on people who are no better off than the ones who operate the looms in order to pay them a higher income than they could earn in a free market. Early in the nineteenth century Great Britain faced precisely the same problem that Japan did a few decades later and India did more than a century later. The power loom threatened to destroy a prosperous hand-loom weaving industry. A royal commission was appointed to investigate the industry. It considered explicitly the policy followed by India: subsidizing hand-loom weaving and guaranteeing the industry a market. It rejected, that policy out of hand on the ground that it would only make the basic problem, an excess of hand-loom weavers, worse—precisely what happened in India.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

I sound a note of scepticism here because the history of capital demonstrates a penchant for monopoly rather than competition and this would not be so favourable for innovation. Instead, we find a strong collective generic preference – a culture as it were – emerging among capitalists for increasing efficiency and productivity across all capitalist enterprises with or without the driving force of competition. Innovations at one point in a supply chain – for example, power loom cotton fabric production – required innovations elsewhere – for example, the cotton gin – if overall productivity was to be improved. But it sometimes took and still takes a while for a whole domain of economic activity to be reorganised on a new technological basis. Last, but by no means least, individual capitalists and corporations came to recognise the importance of product innovation as a way to earn, if only for a while, monopoly profits and, when protected by patent law, a monopoly rent.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

Your backyard is now getting crowded with windmills, churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, algebra, spinning wheels, paper money, soap, and rudimentary democracy. By 11:58, things get even louder with the booms of cannons and rifles, the clacking of a printing press, and the ticking of pendulum clocks. By 11:59, Wanda’s got steel, a steam engine, a piano, and the smallpox vaccine. She’s also begun amassing large-scale industrial equipment—power looms, threshing machines, automatic flour mills, foundries, etc.—in small factories. Thirty seconds before midnight, Wanda invents the stopwatch, the diesel engine, dynamite, genetics, concrete, and photography. Your backyard is suddenly crisscrossed with railroad tracks. The factories have gotten much bigger, and their smokestacks are starting to make things hazy.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

The most famous of these clashes, the Luddite uprising, consisted of combers, weavers, and artisans in the wool and cotton districts of central England. At the time of their rebellion, culminating in 1811–1813, the Jacquard loom had not yet been diffused to Great Britain.4 Their attacks were mainly directed against the power loom and related, organisational changes in the trade. Luddites conducted nightly raids to smash woollen mills and weaving frames and their operations were commanded by the fictive ‘general Ludd’. The English crown had to deploy 14,400 soldiers in the region to crush the nightly insurgencies. Quite remarkably, more English soldiers were mobilised against the Luddites than had been sent to Portugal four years earlier to face Napoleon’s army.5 Still, given the resources and logistics commanded by the state and the capitalists, the workers had very limited chances of stalling the emerging capitalist system.

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity
by Edward Tenner
Published 8 Jun 2004

In fact, the machine sometimes can be the enemy of sophistication in the execution of technique: the historian of technology Arnold Pacey has observed that in the nineteenth century, traditional Indian hand looms looked crude to Western observers but (in the hands of local artisans) produced far better cloth than the output of the massive, beautifully machined British power looms. Likewise, it was difficult to equal the better grades of handmade Japanese paper.22 AUTOMATION AND THE REVENGE OF TECHNIQUE Is skill necessary? Should it be? We are constantly reminded first of how everything has become so much easier to use, and second of how life has grown more complex and requires more education.

Innovation and Its Enemies
by Calestous Juma
Published 20 Mar 2017

The power awarded to the union in fights like the 1942 ban can be traced all the way back to the Luddite rebellion in England, one of the first examples where organized labor and technological innovation clashed. The Luddite protests occurred in the early nineteenth century when textile workers opposed the introduction of power looms, spinning frames, and stocking frames. The changes threated employment. Contrary to popular folklore, the Luddites were not against technological improvement but were defending their livelihoods. The Luddite rebellion was one of the first of many confrontations that unions and industry would have through history and innovation.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

THE GLASGOW PIVOT: FROM TOBACCO TO SHIPPING American independence cut Glasgow’s grip on the tobacco trade and ruined the Virginia Dons, but the city’s economic rise was just beginning. The tobacco merchants had invested in Glasgow’s infrastructure, deepening and clearing the River Clyde. Entrepreneurial Glaswegians had diversified into other businesses, developing steam-driven power looms that made linen quickly and cheaply. Expertise in metalwork and steam technology gained from the linen trade, together with improved river access, helped spawn Glasgow’s second world-leading trade – shipbuilding. While tobacco initially enriched Glasgow, shipbuilding turned it into a superpower of the Industrial Revolution.

Paper: A World History
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 3 Apr 2016

Originally, the movement was active in a wide range of fields, including printing, but by the first decade of the nineteenth century, it was largely focused on the textile industry. It is uncertain why its proponents were called Luddites, but there was a mythical anti-machine rebel of the eighteenth century named Lud who, like Robin Hood, was said to live in Sherwood Forest. The Luddites opposed such technology as power looms, and they attacked mills, smashed machinery, and fought against the British Army. One mill owner was even assassinated, which led to the Frame Breaking Act of 1812, making it a capital crime to break machines. This eventually led to mass trials that crushed the movement. Today, the term Luddite is used to mean someone who opposes new technology.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
by Edward Tenner
Published 1 Sep 1997

Our discontent with experts who promise progress depends on our sense of entitlement to progress. Indignation swells when change fails to bring promised improvement. We are alarmed when our factories close, yet our magazines celebrate the "smashing success" of the early-nineteenth-century Luddites. Articles recall admiringly the stocking workers of the English Midlands who broke the power looms that were depressing prices. A psychologist publishes "Notes Toward a NeoLuddite Manifesto," and a historian of technology praises the machinewreckers' conviction that sometimes progress is worth stopping. The indignation of nineteenth-century producers has yielded to the irritation of late-twentieth-century consumers.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000
by Paul Kennedy
Published 15 Jan 1989

.… ”10 On the other hand, in view of the fact that in 1800 agricultural production formed the basis of both European and non-European societies, and of the further fact that in countries such as India and China there also existed many traders, textile producers, and craftsmen, the differences in per capita income were not enormous; an Indian handloom weaver, for example, may have earned perhaps as much as half of his European equivalent prior to industrialization. What this also meant was that, given the sheer numbers of Asiatic peasants and craftsmen, Asia still contained a far larger share of world manufacturing output* than did the much less populous Europe before the steam engine and the power loom transformed the world’s balances. Just how dramatically those balances shifted in consequence of European industrialization and expansion can be seen in Bairoch’s two ingenious calculations (see Tables 6–7).11 The root cause of these transformations, it is clear, lay in the staggering increases in productivity emanating from the Industrial Revolution.

…

There simply was not enough capital, or local demand, or official enthusiasm, to produce a transformation; and many a European merchant, craftsman, and handloom weaver would bitterly oppose the adoption of English techniques, seeing in them (quite correctly) a threat to their older way of life.35 In consequence, although the steam engine, the power loom, and the railway made some headway in continental Europe, between 1815 and 1848 the traditional features of the economy remained preeminent: the superiority of agriculture over industrial production, the absence of cheap and rapid means of transport, and the priority given to consumer goods over heavy industry.36 As Table 7 above shows, the relative increases in per capita levels of industrialization for the century after 1750 were not very impressive; and only in the 1850s and 1860s did the picture begin to change.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Published 1 Jul 2008

Family members were always traveling to manufacturing centers to keep abreast of new technical developments, or to buy necessary equipment as cheaply as possible. But throughout most of the Western world such cozy arrangements conducive to flow were brutally disrupted by the invention of the first power looms, and the centralized factory system they spawned. By the middle of the eighteenth century family crafts in England were generally unable to compete with mass production. Families were broken up, workers had to leave their cottages and move en masse into ugly and unwholesome plants, rigid schedules lasting from dawn to dusk were enforced.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

This book is an effort to restore balance to the subject in a way that will allow readers of various levels of expertise and understanding to get a grip on what it is, how it works, and what it might mean for all of us. We’re journalists, not futurists. Our intent is not to outline some definitive case for what the future will look like. But if we’ve learned anything since the arrival of the Internet, it’s that technology does not wait for us to catch up. From threshing machines and power looms to electricity and assembly lines to mainframe computers and e-mail, individuals and governments who haven’t paid significant attention to new technologies have been in for a nasty shock. We believe bitcoin, and more specifically the breakthroughs that have made it and other cryptocurrencies particularly effective tools for monetary exchange, have the potential to be an important force in finance.

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
by James Rickards
Published 7 Apr 2014

Financial war entails the use of derivatives and the penetration of exchanges to cause havoc, incite panic, and ultimately disable an enemy’s economy. Financial war goes well beyond industrial espionage, which has existed at least since the early 1800s, when an American, Francis Cabot Lowell, memorized the design for the English power loom and recreated one in the United States. The modern financial war arsenal includes covert hedge funds and cyberattacks that can compromise order-entry systems to mimic a flood of sell orders on stocks like Apple, Google, and IBM. Efficient-market theorists who are skeptical of such tactics fail to fathom the irrational underbelly of markets in full flight.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time
by James Suzman
Published 2 Sep 2020

If anything, the early years of the Industrial Revolution were marked by the mass culling of a whole range of well-established and sometimes even ancient professions, from weavers to farriers, while creating a handful of opportunities for a new class of workers comprised of aspirant engineers, scientists, designers, inventors, architects and entrepreneurs, almost all of whom came from the private school- and Oxbridge-educated urban classes. For those destined to work on the factory floors, actual skills were not on the list of qualities that their employers wanted. What they required were bodies that could be trained to operate their spinning jennys, water frames and power looms. Life was hard even for those working for the most enlightened employers – by the grim standards of the time – like Richard Arkwright. The inventor of the spinning frame – a machine for binding thread – he established a series of mills across the north of England between 1771 and 1792, was one of the principal targets of the Luddite Rebellion, and is now often thought of as ‘the inventor of the factory system’.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 7 May 2018

The “fingers of the spinners . . . with the aid of that classical instrument the domestic spinning wheel,” he wrote, have at last and for all time been superseded by this machine, which has “several thousand spindles . . . in a single room, revolving with inconceivable rapidity, with no hand to urge their progress or to guide their operations, drawing out, twisting and winding up as many [as a] thousand threads with unfailing precision, indefatigable patience and strength—a scene as magical to the eye that is not familiarized to it, as the effects have been marvellous in augmenting wealth and population.” ROBERT HUNT DID fret, somewhat. At the close of one particularly lyrical passage about a new power loom, he wrote, “Wonderful mechanical result! What are the moral results?” and repeated his concerns in a similar manner throughout his writings. But few other visitors or critics seemed to share his sentiments, or worried about the social implications. Not in Britain, anyway. The French were perhaps most aware that there might be a downside to all that “unfailing precision”: the ennobled mathematician and politician Charles Dupin warned that “by superseding the labour, the country is depopulated and filled with machines,” and it would be up to the politicians of the future to decide if that was progress.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

The narrative was particularly contagious during economic depressions when many were unemployed. The defining event was a protest in 1811 in the United Kingdom by a group that claimed a mythical man, Ludd, as their spiritual leader. The mutation that renewed the old narrative and made it so virulent in 1811 was a new kind of power loom that was eliminating weavers’ jobs. The word Luddite continued to appear regularly in newspapers in following years and today remains a synonym for a person who resists technological progress. In 1830, the Swing Riots in Britain were a response to the loss of farm jobs that occurred when the new mechanical thresher entered widespread use.

The Taste of Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World
by Lizzie Collingham
Published 2 Oct 2017

Shying away from the complicated politics of slavery and sugar, Mr Oldknow was beguiled by the cloaked figure of the Egg-Collector of Cork, with laughing grey eyes and long black lashes, miraculously recovered from the effects of famine. Next appeared the gnomic figure of Salt, who berated Mr Oldknow for depriving the Hindoo of fiscal justice, in a reference to the salt tax the British administration imposed on its Indian subjects. The Milky Genius took his place, a combination of a dairymaid and a water nymph. Finally a power-loom weaver ‘stepped forth, with a pudding-cloth in hand. “The water boils,” said he; “the ingredients are mixed. Be it mine to bind them together!”’5 A giant pudding arose out of the bowl and swelled into ‘an enormous globe’ and a Frenchman emerged out of a bunch of holly to pour a flask of brandy over the pudding, announcing, ‘It is the genius of our nation to flare up!’

The Rough Guide to Egypt (Rough Guide to...)
by Dan Richardson and Daniel Jacobs
Published 1 Feb 2013

Weaving factory Midan Meryut Amun • No set hours • Free The building with green gates to the right of Ramses’ colossus is home to a weaving factory, one of four built in the 1900s using power-looms from England that nearly wiped out the local hand-weaving industry – a tradition going back to the pharaohs, who were buried in shrouds of Akhmim silk. Hand-weaving was only preserved by a missionary inspired Women’s Cooperative (Rahabaat) whose tapestries now sell for thousands of dollars. The cooperative’s weavers forgo any publicity in order not to irritate their menfolk, who work the power-looms in another section of the factory. The factory, however, may let you see its (male) weavers at work and has a shop downstairs, selling tablecloths, sheets and cuts from bolts of silk or cotton – all in 1950s’ patterns.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 31 Dec 1998

—Theodore Kaczynski The weavers of Nottingham enjoyed a modest but comfortable lifestyle from their thriving cottage industry of producing fine stockings and lace. This went on for hundreds of years, as their stable family businesses were passed down from generation to generation. But with the invention of the power loom and the other textile automation machines of the early eighteenth century, the weavers’ livelihoods came to an abrupt end. Economic power passed from the weaving families to the owners of the machines. Into this turmoil came a young and feebleminded boy named Ned Ludd, who, legend has it, broke two textile factory machines by accident as a result of sheer clumsiness.

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

The second and third of these increased in quantity in the nineteenth century,* but it was the qualitative improvement that really mattered – the fact that total output exceeded the combined increments of workers and mills. In terms of supply, then, the Industrial Revolution was a hunt for efficiency. James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1766), Richard Arkwright’s water frame (1769), Samuel Crompton’s mule (1779), Edmund Cartwright’s steam-powered loom (1787) and Richard Roberts’s self-acting mule (1830): these were all ways of making more thread or cloth per man-hour. The spinning jenny, for example, allowed a single worker simultaneously to spin cotton yarn with eight spindles. Thanks to these innovations, the unit price of British cotton manufactures declined by approximately 90 per cent between the mid-1790s and 1830.7 The same applied to the other key breakthroughs in iron production and steam-power generation.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

Unfortunately, the engineering was more complicated than the conceptualization. Babbage completely underestimated the financial and technical resources he would need to build his engine. He was at the cutting edge of production technology, for although relatively crude machines such as steam engines and power looms were in widespread use, sophisticated devices such as pin-making machines were still a novelty. By the 1850s such machinery would be commonplace, and there would exist a mechanical-engineering infrastructure that made building them relatively easy. While building the Difference Engine in the 1820s was not in any sense impossible, Babbage was paying the price of being a first mover; it was rather like building the first computers in the mid-1940s: difficult and extremely expensive.

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
by Simon Winchester
Published 14 Oct 2013

The construction, which had been prompted by a fall-line chain of rapids and waterfalls along the Merrimack that made the river essentially non-navigable, coincided with and then accelerated the planned development of the city of Lowell as one of early America’s great mill centers. Long rows of cloth factories, roaring with water-powered loom noise, were promptly thrown up alongside the waterways where the Merrimack and the Concord Rivers join. Bales of Southern cotton were then brought in, and millions of yards of finished textiles were then sent out—and all of them along the Middlesex Canal. The twenty locks, seven aqueducts, and well-cemented walls (and the newfangled technical marvel of a floating towpath) of this beautifully built and scrupulously maintained waterway allowed supply boats to get down from Lowell to Boston in only eighteen hours, the goods then being sent on for export or transit to the rest of America.

Robot Rules: Regulating Artificial Intelligence
by Jacob Turner
Published 29 Oct 2018

We do not want to be in the position of the first automobile drivers in the nineteenth century, who were required to drive at no greater than two miles per hour in cities and to employ someone to walk in front of their vehicle waving a red flag.125 Technology is not always adopted uncritically: progress for the majority can often conflict with vested interests. In the early nineteenth century, the “Luddites”—aggrieved agricultural workers supposedly led by Ned Ludd—rioted for several years, destroying mechanised power looms which threatened their employment.126 Today debates continue as to whether countries should harness nuclear technology to satisfy insatiable demands for energy. We are in danger of oscillating between the complacency of the optimists and the craven scruples of the pessimists. AI presents incredible opportunities for the benefit of humanity and we do not wish to fetter or shackle this progress unnecessarily.

Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Published 9 Mar 2000

Tools, ofcourse, have always abstracted labor power from the object oflabor to a certain degree. In previous periods, however, the tools generally were related in a relatively inflexible way to certain tasks or certain groups of tasks; different tools corresponded to different activities—the tailor’s tools, the weaver’s tools, or later a sewing machine and a power loom. The computer proposes itself, in contrast, as the universal tool, or rather as the central tool, through which all activities might pass. Through the computerization of production, then, labor tends toward the position ofabstract labor. The model ofthe computer, however, can account for only one face of the communicational and immaterial labor involved in the production ofservices.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
Published 20 Mar 2012

An important first step was the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733. Though it initially simply increased the productivity of hand weavers, its most enduring impact would be in opening the way to mechanized weaving. Building on the flying shuttle, Edmund Cartwright introduced the power loom in 1785, a first step in a series of innovations that would lead to machines replacing manual skills in weaving as they were also doing in spinning. The English textile industry not only was the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution but also revolutionized the world economy. English exports, led by cotton textiles, doubled between 1780 and 1800.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

More often than not, the new opportunities created by technology are minor in nature: an ingenious new way of grinding coffee beans, for instance, is unlikely to lead to the overthrow of the state. But sometimes the consequences can be profound. In the industrial revolution, the OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Introduction 13 invention of power looms and stocking and spinning frames threatened to displace the jobs of skilled textile workers. Some of those workers, known as the Luddites, launched a violent rampage through the English countryside, destroying the new machines as they went. We still use the word Luddite to describe those who resist the arrival of new and disruptive technologies.

Of a Fire on the Moon
by Norman Mailer
Published 2 Jun 2014

We must dip into a disquisition on the property of computers, or we will comprehend nothing of the melodrama which follows. IV Consider a list which includes the discovery of the wheel, the extraction of iron from earth, the invention of gunpowder and the printing press, the steam engine, the power loom, the electric generator and the internal combustion engine. The names of Christ, Mohammed and Buddha; of Augustine and Luther; Darwin, Marx and Freud. We may as well recognize what is common; it is the power of the man or of the invention to create other inventions, other styles of life, not even conceived in the origin.

The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 25 Jun 2024

But we know AI is going to continue to progress—exponentially—until we have superhuman-level AI and fully automated, atomically precise manufacturing (controlled by AI) sometime in the 2030s. Yet this is hardly the first time that people have been able to clearly see their jobs being likely to succumb en masse to automation. The story began two centuries ago when the weavers of Nottingham were threatened by the introduction of the power loom and other textile machines.[24] These laborers had enjoyed a modest living from their skillful production of stockings and lace in stable family businesses that had been passed down through the generations. But the technological innovations of the early nineteenth century shifted the industry’s economic power into the hands of the machine owners, leaving the weavers in danger of losing their jobs.

Wealth, Poverty and Politics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 31 Aug 2015

We have already noted some of the many cultural features of Asia that spread to Europe over the centuries. A similar process of cultural diffusion occurred between different regions within Europe. Among the cultural advances that spread, over the centuries, from Western Europe to Eastern Europe were coins, castles, crossbows, paved streets, printing presses, power looms, vaccinations, railroads and automobiles.1 When Lithuania established the University of Vilnius in the sixteenth century, most of the students came from Eastern Europe but most of the faculty came from Western Europe.2 When Dorpat University was established in Tartu, Estonia in 1802, it was in effect a German university on the soil of the Russian Empire, with nearly half its faculty coming from Germany itself, and the remainder including domestic Baltic Germans.3 Not all social groups, races, nations or civilizations have been equally receptive to absorbing cultural advances from others.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
by James C. Scott
Published 8 Feb 1999

The difference between low-technology family farming and large-scale, mechanized farming was precisely the difference between the hand-operated looms of cottage-industry weavers on one hand and the mechanized looms of large textile factories on the other. The first mode of production was simply doomed. Lenin's analogy was borrowed from Marx, who frequently used it as a way of saying that the hand loom gives you feudalism and the power loom gives you capitalism. So suggestive was this imagery that Lenin fell back on it in other contexts, claiming, for example, in What Is to Be Done? that his opponents, the Economists, were using "handicraft methods," whereas the Bolsheviks operated as professional (modern, trained) revolutionaries.

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 27 Nov 2012

But there are many more surprises, cataloged in Bill Bryson’s Home, in which the author found ten times more vicars and clergymen leaving recorded traces for posterity than scientists, physicists, economists, and even inventors. In addition to the previous two giants, I randomly list contributions by country clergymen: Rev. Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom, contributing to the Industrial Revolution; Rev. Jack Russell bred the terrier; Rev. William Buckland was the first authority on dinosaurs; Rev. William Greenwell invented modern archaeology; Rev. Octavius Pickard-Cambridge was the foremost authority on spiders; Rev. George Garrett invented the submarine; Rev.

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time
by Stephen Fried
Published 23 Mar 2010

In the fall of 1926, the Santa Fe started a faster daily train service that cut the ride between Chicago and Los Angeles by more than five hours, to just under sixty-three hours total—“only two business days.” Previous high-end trains always used names employing words such as “special” or “limited,” but this new train was simply called “the Chief,” and all its advertising featured a stylized drawing of a powerful, looming Indian leader. For the inaugural run of the Chief, the cast of the new MGM Western War Paint rode between Chicago and Los Angeles in costume. While the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific started competing fast train service the same day, their ceremonies and photo ops featured only executives and starlets christening engines with champagne bottles.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

A severe academic with an obsessive interest in systems of production rather than grand theories, he believed firmly in free trade and free enterprise. Very early on he argued that capitalism’s great strength lay in its capacity to modernize itself constantly through an inexorable process of destructive innovation. Just as powered looms had destroyed the usefulness of professional handloom weavers who had earlier displaced part-time cottage weavers, so railroads pushed aside the canals that had made wagon trains redundant. And deep-pocketed, publicly listed companies had bankrupted those private entrepreneurs who had only their own securities to fall back on.

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order
by Rush Doshi
Published 24 Jun 2021

His gloominess about the US position relative to the Soviet Union had long been well known.7 That gloominess is now back among many in American strategic circles, and the conversation between Zumwalt and Kissinger fifty years ago could just as easily have happened today. Then, as now, the United States was facing enormous domestic strains while a rising power loomed over the horizon. And then, as now, some believed that US policy should be less provocative and competitive, reflect the fact that “historical forces” were supposedly arrayed against the country, and seek the best deal possible with an ascendant rival. A refashioned version of Kissinger’s argument today might point out that China dominates global manufacturing, increasingly rivals the United States in high-technology, boasts an economy larger than the American one in purchasing power terms, fields the world’s largest navy, and has weathered a once-in-a-century pandemic better than most others—the only great power to avoid recession in 2020.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

Had the Industrial Revolution of 1770–1870 lightened the toil of the overwhelming majority of humanity—even in Britain, the country at the leading edge? Doubtful. Had it materially raised the living standards of the overwhelming majority—even in Britain? By a little. Compared to how mankind had lived before the revolution, it was unquestionably a big deal: steam power and iron making and power looms and telegraph wires had provided comforts for many and fortunes for a few. But how humans lived had not been transformed. And there were legitimate fears. As late as 1919 British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that while Malthus’s Devil had been “chained up and out of sight,” with the catastrophe of World War I, “perhaps we have loosed him again.”3 A fixation on food makes compelling sense to the hungry.

The Gun
by C. J. Chivers
Published 12 Oct 2010

Therefore, if one becomes a target of this terrible engine of destruction, three or four shots may go through the same space in rapid succession, making the wound very large. ... And the sound it makes! Heard close by, it is a rapid succession of tap, tap, tap; but from a distance it sounds like a power loom heard late at night when everything else is hushed. It is a sickening, horrible sound! The Russians regard this machine as their best friend, and certainly it did very much as a means of defense. They were wonderfully clever in the use of this machine. They would wait till our men came very near them, four or five kenii only, and just at the moment when we proposed to shout a triumphant Banzai, this dreadful machine would begin to sweep over us with the besom of destruction, the results being hills and mounds of dead.17 Japanese ground forces besieged Port Arthur late in summer 1904.

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964)
by Unknown
Published 7 Jun 2012

It is possible to compile a fine catalogue of seventeenth-century inventions, and to deduce from it that a great technical movement was in force at that time. Many writeis have fallen into this error— among them, Jean Laloup and Jean Nelis. It is not because Pascal invented a calculating machine and Papin a steam engine that there was a technical evolution; nor was it because a “prototype” of a power loom was built; nor because the process of the dry distillation of coal was discovered. As Cille has very judiciously noted: "The best-described machines in the eight­ eenth century Encyclopedic are possibly better conceived than those of the fifteenth century, but scarcely constitute a revolution." The initial problem was to construct the machine, to make the in­ vented technique actually work.

Bali & Lombok Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Ikat Ikat involves dyeing either the warp threads (those stretched on the loom) or weft threads (those woven across the warp) before the material is woven. The resulting pattern is geometric and slightly wavy. The colouring typically follows a similar tone – blues and greens; reds and browns; or yellows, reds and oranges. Gianyar, in east Bali, has a few factories where you can watch ikat sarongs being woven on a hand-and-foot-powered loom. A complete sarong takes about six hours to make. The nonprofit Lontar Foundation (www.lontar.org) works to get Indonesian books translated into English so that universities around the world can offer courses in Indonesian literature. Lombok Lombok is renowned for traditional weaving on backstrap looms, the techniques handed down from mother to daughter.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
by Daniel Yergin
Published 23 Dec 2008

In the Cold War years, the battle for control of oil between international companies and developing countries was a major part of the great drama of decolonization and emergent nationalism. The Suez Crisis of 1956, which truly marked the end of the road for the old European imperial powers, was as much about oil as about anything else. "Oil power" loomed very large in the 1970s, catapulting states heretofore peripheral to international politics into positions of great wealth and influence, and creating a deep crisis of confidence in the industrial nations that had based their economic growth upon oil. And oil was at the heart of the first post-Cold War crisis of the 1990s—Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

…

There was also "town gas," distilled from coal, which was piped into street lamps and into the homes of an increasing number of middle-and upper-class families in urban areas. But "town gas" was expensive, and there was a sharply growing need for a reliable, relatively cheap illuminant. There was that second need as well—lubrication. The advances in mechanical production had led to such machines as power looms and the steam printing press, which created too much friction for such common lubricants as lard. Entrepreneurial innovation had already begun to respond to these needs in the late 1840s and early 1850s, with the extraction of illuminating and lubricating oils from coal and other hydrocarbons.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 10 Sep 2018

One of photography’s inventors, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, and many of its first commentators were concerned primarily with art, specifically painting, which they thought would either be facilitated or nullified by the miraculous mechanical invention. One writer hailed the daguerreotype as “equally valuable to art as the power-loom and steam-engine to manufactures, and the drill and steam-plough to agriculture.”94 Others contended that photography heralded the death of painting. Soon photography would, in fact, unshackle artists from any remaining obligation to capture visual reality, thus clearing a broad path for modernist painters such as Gauguin, van Gogh, and Picasso, not to mention early art photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

Pressures bubbled during the Napoleonic Wars, and nearly boiled over after 1815, as twenty years of rising prices gave way to sharp trade depressions, deflation and discontent, amidst the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution. From 1816 to 1819, protest spread in waves through northern manufacturing towns and rural parishes, with the smashing of power-looms and threshing machines, and bread riots involving laid-off operatives and farm labourers. The famous clash at St Peters Field on 16 August 1819 showed how quickly tensions in the country became political: reformers called a rally to demand parliamentary representation for the large towns and votes for working men, and more than 60,000 people packed into the centre of Manchester.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 14 Jul 2005

A more conservative estimate, which assumes that it will be necessary to simulate all of the nonlinearities in every synapse and dendrite, results in an estimate of 1019 cps for neuromorphic emulation of the human brain. Even taking the more conservative figure, we get a figure of 1029 cps for the approximately 1010 humans. Thus, the 1060 cps that can be purchased for one thousand dollars circa 2099 will represent 1031 (ten million trillion trillion) human civilizations. 37. The invention of the power loom and the other textile automation machines of the early eighteenth century destroyed the livelihoods of the cottage industry of English weavers, who had passed down stable family businesses for hundreds of years. Economic power passed from the weaving families to the owners of the machines. As legend has it, a young and feebleminded boy named Ned Ludd broke two textile factory machines out of sheer clumsiness.

The World's First Railway System: Enterprise, Competition, and Regulation on the Railway Network in Victorian Britain
by Mark Casson
Published 14 Jul 2009

On the actual system it was served by three separate termini—Lime Street, Central, and Exchange—whereas on the counterfactual, lines fan out from a single station to the principal inland hubs to the north and east of the city. 4 . 1 1 . N O RT H M I D L A N D S The North Midlands comprises Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. As the home of Richard Arkwright, inventor of the water-powered loom, the county town of Derby was the site of early textile factories, and Nottingham developed as a lace manufacturing centre too. By the nineteenth century large coalWelds were being exploited in the Erewash Valley between Derby and Nottingham, and in Charnwood Forest, to the south near Loughborough.

The Years of Rice and Salt
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 2 Jun 2003

Meanwhile more refugees came pouring east, until the Gansu Corridor, Shaarixi, and Xining were all crowded with new arrivals – all Muslim, but not necessarily friendly towards each other, and oblivious of their Chinese hosts. Lanzhou appeared to be prospering, the markets were jammed, the mines and foundries and smithies and factories were all pouring out armaments, and new machinery of all kinds, threshers, power looms, carts; but the ramshackle west end of town now extended along the bank of the Yellow River for many li, and both banks of the Tao River were slums, where people lived in tents, or in the open air. No one in town recognized the place any more, and everyone stayed behind locked doors at night, if they were prudent.

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Published 23 Sep 2019

In the course of a few decades, technology and the organization of production were transformed in a number of key industries. Leading the way were textiles, where a series of innovative breakthroughs in spinning, such as the water frame, the spinning jenny, and the mule revolutionized productivity. Similar innovations occurred in weaving, with the introduction of the flying shuttle and various types of power looms. Equally transformative were the novel forms of inanimate power starting with Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine and then James Watt’s steam engine. The steam engine not only made mining much more productive by enabling the pumping of water out of mines, but also changed transportation and metallurgy.

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
by Walter Scheidel
Published 14 Oct 2019

The last self-styled Roman emperor, the Habsburg Francis II, did not abdicate until August 6, 1806, twenty months after Napoleon Bonaparte had crowned himself emperor of the French and only about a year after the latter had shelved his plans to invade Britain, where the first steam locomotive had recently been displayed and steady improvements to the power loom kept the patent office busy. But that would-be master of Europe, however revolutionary in appearance, was merely the last hurrah of ancient designs. The Roman empire remained unique, and the long shadow it had cast was just that. Europe had well and truly escaped, ensuring our collective release into an unexpected future.

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind
by Jan Lucassen
Published 26 Jul 2021

The toughest resistance to new machines, in the form of Luddism, was found in rural Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire in 1811–12. It was founded in ‘the personal, kinship and other social connections within a workshop culture or small quasi-peasant community’. Highly disciplined ‘guerrilla bands’ were only able to carry out countless successful nighttime attacks on the new cloth-finishing machinery, stocking frames and power looms, as well as their owners, because everyone kept their mouths shut. Incidentally, Luddism is not an exclusively English phenomenon; it also is known from France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Mexico, among others.18 Less heroic, but much more general and also successful for a long time, were attempts at adaptation, which highlight the creativity of workers.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Published 18 Oct 2021

Nor does our evidence support the notion that major innovations always occur in sudden, revolutionary bursts, transforming everything in their wake. (This, as you’ll recall, was one of the main points to emerge from the two chapters we devoted to the origins of farming.) Nobody, of course, claims that the beginnings of agriculture were anything quite like, say, the invention of the steam-powered loom or the electric light bulb. We can be fairly certain there was no Neolithic equivalent of Edmund Cartwright or Thomas Edison, who came up with the conceptual breakthrough that set everything in motion. Still, it often seems difficult for contemporary writers to resist the idea that some sort of similarly dramatic break with the past must have occurred.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh
by Carl Zimmer
Published 29 May 2018

Instead of using animal-drawn plows, farmers could run tractors powered with new fuels like gasoline. Instead of spreading manure from their own livestock, they could spread fertilizers extracted from mines or produced from petroleum. The cotton gathered by New World slaves no longer had to be woven by people; it was now turned over to coal-powered looms. As railroads cut across continents, cattle could be grazed on lands thousands of miles from the people who would ultimately eat them. The influence of human culture now produced a worldwide ecological inheritance. By some measures, this cultural feedback loop has been a great success. Before the Agricultural Revolution, a square kilometer of land could typically feed fewer than ten hunter-gatherers.

Lonely Planet Scotland
by Lonely Planet

You can see the dyeing process and try hand-spinning in the exhibition area behind the studio, which sells finished knitwear as well as yarns. Skye WeaversARTS & CRAFTS (%01470-511201; www.skyeweavers.co.uk; 18 Fasach, Glendale, Duirinish; h10am-6pm Tue-Sat Mar-Oct) Signposted off the main road, a wooden shed on an old croft houses a pedal-powered loom where the owners create hand-woven tweed and turn it into scarves, shawls, throws and other household and fashion items. You can watch the loom at work before browsing the shop. Dandelion DesignsARTS & CRAFTS (%01470-592218; www.dandelion-designs.co.uk; Captain’s House, Stein, Waternish; h11am-5pm Easter-Oct, shorter hours Nov-Mar; #) Dandelion Designs is an interesting little gallery with a good range of colour and monochrome landscape photography, lino prints by Liz Myhill and a range of handmade arts and crafts.

A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Published 2 Jan 1977

Putting all women into the same category—giving them all the same domestic sphere to cultivate—created a classification (by sex) which blurred the lines of class, as Nancy Cott points out. However, forces were at work to keep raising the issue of class. Samuel Slater had introduced industrial spinning machinery in New England in 1789, and now there was a demand for young girls—literally, “spinsters”—to work the spinning machinery in factories. In 1814, the power loom was introduced in Waltham, Massachusetts, and now all the operations needed to turn cotton fiber into cloth were under one roof. The new textile factories swiftly multiplied, with women 80 to 90 percent of their operatives—most of these women between fifteen and thirty. Some of the earliest industrial strikes took place in these textile mills in the 1830s.

The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand
Published 1 Jan 1943

Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received—hatred. The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won. “No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives.

Parks Directory of the United States
by Darren L. Smith and Kay Gill
Published 1 Jan 2004

Facilities: Picnic area, rest rooms (u), visitor center (u), museum/exhibit, self-guided tour/trail. Activities: Ranger-led walks, guided tours (including canal boat tours and river tours). Special Features: The history of America’s Industrial Revolution is commemorated in the heart of dowtown Lowell. The Boott Cotton Mills Museum with its operating weave room of 88 power looms, ‘‘mill girl’’ boardinghouses, the Suffolk Mill Turbine Exhibit, and guided tours tell the story of the transition from farm to factory, chronicle immigrant and labor history, and trace industrial technology. The park includes textile mills, worker housing, 5.6 miles of canals, and 19th-century commercial buildings.