![]() ![]() They built more mills on the Merrimack in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire. Lowell died in 1817, but the Boston Associates went on to build a complete factory town along the powerful Merrimack River in Massachusetts, naming it Lowell in his honor. Hours were long, and the work was repetitive. Factory work allowed for little independent action. For the total mill operation to run smoothly, all the machines had to be operating at the same time and at a steady speed. It was not easy to be a mill worker, though. The operators fed the threads into the machine and then allowed it to do the work, stopping the process only if threads broke or there was a malfunction. The machines in the Lowell textile mills only made one kind of cloth, and they were easy to operate without much training. Cotton, delivered to the mill in bales, traveled through the entire building, going through a different part of the manufacturing process in each room until exiting as finished cloth. Belts ran up from the wheels to all floors to run the machines. Waterwheels, wheels that rotate due to the force of moving water, powered the mills the rotation of the wheel is then used to power a factory or machine. The Boston Associates hired the best machinists they could find to build the advanced textile machinery that filled the company's mills. The production process became known as the Waltham-Lowell system, named after the Massachusetts towns in which the four-story brick mills resided. For the first time in the United States, raw bales of cotton could be transformed into bolts of cloth under one roof. Two years later, the company had built the water-powered mill Lowell had envisioned. Knowing he would need large amounts of money to create a factory, in 1812 Lowell formed an association of wealthy investors, the Boston Associates. Textile mechanic Samuel Slater (1768–1835) had already successfully mechanized the spinning, or yarn-making, process, and other busi-nesspeople had followed his example, creating the early factories in New England. He then began to study other processes of textile production to determine how to carry out large-scale production at low cost. ![]() Back in Massachusetts, Lowell was able to create his own version of a working power loom with the help of a highly skilled mechanic. He was impressed with British technology, particularly an automated weaving machine called the power loom (a frame or machine used to weave thread or yarn into cloth) that was not available in the United States. In 1810, Lowell had visited England's textile mills (cloth-making factories). This method changed in the early nineteenth century, due in large part to the efforts of wealthy Boston businessman Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817). One of the first steps in the shift to the factory system was cottage labor, in which unfinished materials were distributed to workers (usually women) in their homes, to be completed and returned to the manufacturer. In 1815, most of the goods used by an American family were either made in the home or obtained from a local craftsperson. ![]()
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