The Machinery Question

Hey friends 👋,

In pre-industrial England, being a weaver was a good job.

Weaving was an accessible trade with a relatively short apprenticeship. The work itself was not incredibly demanding, but the demand for the work was high and steady. Most weavers worked three days a week from the comfort of their own homes their entire lives.

Tools like the handloom, a manually operated set of rollers and braces, did most of the literal heavy lifting and tensioning of the thread. The real role of the weaver was to focus on the devils in the details that come with any craft and ensure the products they produced were of a high degree of precision, accuracy, and quality.

Being a weaver was a respectable career that offered a high degree of flexible, sustainable, and creative work.

Until the power loom was invented.

Developed by Edmund Cartwright in 1784, the power loom was essentially a steam-powered handloom. The machine automated the task of weaving thread into fabric by replacing the human operator with an engine and a set of gears.

A skilled handloom weaver could produce around 10 centimeters of fabric a day. The power loom could produce around 10 meters in the same amount of time.

But all technologies come with tradeoffs, and the power loom's order of magnitude increase in speed came with significant sacrifices to the physical and social fabrics of 19th century England.

The power loom was massive and expensive. The machine was far too large to share space with a weaver and their family – even if they could afford one. Instead, the wealthy entrepreneurs and aristocrats of England bought looms and built factories on public lands outside of town to house them.

By being priced out of owning this new tech, the autonomy weavers once wielded over their work slowly eroded. Workers were required to report to factories at set schedules. They were watched at all times by the entrepreneurs and floor managers. And the holistic, skillful craft of creating fabric was replaced by the separate tasks that kept the machine running.

Entrepreneurs realized this deskilling early on and saw it as a great benefit of the factory system. They didn't need the educated and experienced weavers to do these tasks. Instead, they could hire the cheapest possible laborer.

And they found that in orphan children.

Factory owners began making deals with local orphanages to "rent" children. They carted kids to their factories. Fed them porridge. And forced them to work on the factory floor until they were exhausted or worse: dead.

So many children died while operating the dangerous machinery in these factories that entrepreneurs started strategically sending bodies for blessing and burial to different abbeys and churches as to not arouse suspicion.

We don't often think about technology making something "easier" as having downsides. Tools that make tasks more accessible are almost always seen as virtuous. But in 19th century England, the fact that the power loom deskilled fabric production had horrific consequences.

And the great irony is that all of these sacrifices to life and livelihood also came at the cost of quality.

The power loom removed much of the precision, accuracy and artistry of weaving. Instead of being able to carefully attend to the details of sew and weft as weavers would, the power loom cranked out consistently low-quality cloth.

People at the time talked about how the shirts produced from power loomed fabrics tore more easily and didn't look as polished as those produced with traditional techniques.

But for many consumers, that didn't matter. All they noticed was that the shirt was significantly cheaper. And the market did what the market does. The cheap goods undercut the competition, lowered the acceptable market price, and the sellers who couldn't reduce their prices to meet the market went out of business.

Thousands of weavers in Northern England lost their entire livelihoods. Their families went hungry. And some sent their own children to risk their lives in the factories because at least there they would eat.

This was the disruptive backdrop of what we now know as the Luddite Rebellion. A decentralized group of weavers revolted against this technological shift, broke into factories, and destroyed the machines.

After years of highly effective vandalistic attacks that were supported by most of the English population, a group of five young men were eventually caught. For their transgressions, the English elite made an example out of the entire town. They executed 52 men and women.

Their children were sent to the orphanages.

We often use the term "luddite" as a pejorative for those we feel stand in the way of technological progress. But in actuality, the Luddites were the ones fighting for real progress.