From Spinning Wheels to Power Looms

Today we were given six documents that connected to a major idea of the Industrial Revolution. We analyzed these documents and created a museum exhibit about them. The first thing we did was go through all of the documents and read them over. Then we completed sourcing question to find the author, the date, and the title of each document. After that we inferred the reason the author had for creating the source, and what a visitor to the museum would learn from it. This analysis process was very important to curating the exhibit because without doing it we wouldn't be able to understand the sources for ourselves, and then we would never have been able to create an clear and informational exhibit.

 My group was working on exhibit A, which was all about the industrialization of looms, and moving spinning to mills. Before the industrialization people worked and spun in their homes on their own spinning wheels, but the industrial revolution moved spinning wheels into mills. This meant that only one person from the family could go to the mills and work to support the family, rather than the whole family pitching in to help at the house. Our sources were two pictures of older spinning machines, such as the Spinning Wheel and the Almond Looms, and two pictures of industrialized spinning machines such as the Spinning Jenny and Mechanized Looms. Also, we had a chart that showed to population growth in London after the industrial revolution, and an excerpt from a piece about the effect the mills had on spinning families. 

The title we created for our exhibit was "From Spinning Wheels to Power Looms." We chose this title because it showcased our overall theme, which was the industrialization of spinning and the affect it had on families that worked in that trade. I hope that visitors to the exhibit learn that the industrial revolution wasn't all good. While it increased production of clothes and textiles, it had a bad effect on families that were used to income from everyone in the family. 

As we toured the other exhibits in our "museum," I learned a lot more about the ways the industrial revolution affected people. From Group B I learned that the innovation of the steam engine on railroads made it easier to transport goods from one place to another. It made transportation of goods faster and more efficient, and allowed people to receive goods from other areas rather than just locally. From Group C I learned that due to the industrial revolution, the cities were filthy. People were living and working in terrible conditions, houses were dirty and overpopulated, and smoke from factories was polluting the air. From Group D I learned that children worked in mines and mills from extremely young ages. They did more laborous work than any adults, and were working all day long. And finally from Group E I learned that there was a huge increase in cotton manufacturing, but slaves were used to do all the hard labor. And after the industrial revolution the slave population grew from less than 500,000 to more than 3,500,000.