Industrial Revolution and the Factory System

Industrial Revolution: the long, slow process of changing from goods being made at HOME by HAND to being made in FACTORIES by MACHINE.

Before the 1800s, most people lived on farms. This slowly started to change. Things that were once made by hand were beginning to be made by machine. Although most people continued to farm, manufacturing became an increasingly important part of the economy.

This process mainly began in the textiles industry (making cloth and thread). For a long time, spinning wheels had been used to make thread. But, when James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny which could spin multiple threads at once, the process was much faster.

Factory System

In Britain, a new factory system brought together workers and machines all in the same place. In these factories, workers earned wages and worked a set number of hours each day.

Britain wanted to keep this system a secret, so they made it illegal for anyone to carry the plans for a factory outside of the country. Anyone who boarded a ship to leave the country was searched to make sure they did not carry any plans.

Samuel Slater memorized the plans for a factory and took them to the United States where he sold them to a Quaker in Rhode Island named Moses Brown. Together they built the first American spinning mill.

The Lowell Mills

A man named Francis Cabot Lowell improved on the British factory version by creating one factory that both spun thread and wove cloth in the same building.

In the Lowell Mills, they employed girls from local farms. The girls stayed in houses by the mills. They became known as the "Lowell girls." They worked long hours for little money, which they sent home to their families. Girls usually only worked in the mills for a few years before getting married.

Many factories chose to hire women and children because they could pay them half as much as men. Also, children could easily fit between the large machines to change spindles of thread.

Eli Whitney came up with the idea of interchangeable parts. Most goods were made by skilled workers and were unique. So, if something broke, a new piece would need to be made by that skilled worker, which would take a lot of time. Whitney envisioned making goods all out of the same parts so that if something broke, it could easily be replaced.

What would happen if the foot of your chair broke off?

During the Industrial Revolution, many people began moving out of rural areas into urban areas to work in factories. This process is called urbanization.

Rural: living in the country

Urban: living in a city

Urbanization: the movement of the population from farms to cities.

ATTRACTIONS HAZARDS

1) Theatres 1) Dirt roads turned to mud

2) Museums 2) No sewers

3) Circuses 3) People threw garbage into the streets

4) Stores with "European Fashions"

4) Diseases spread fast

5) Buying goods from stores instead of making hand-made goods

5) Fires spread quickly

New forms of transportation began to connect these cities to the western frontier. The building of the Erie Canal connected the Atlantic Coast to the Great Lakes. It also caused upstate New York to develop rapidly.

Salina Street, Syracuse, NY c.1904

The speed of transportation was also increased with the invention of the steam engine. New steam boats could travel much faster and move goods and passengers cheaper than before.