Textile Mills

These industrial giants, behemoth structures, that were scattered across the Lowell municipal landscape – often, former rolling hills and fields in Chelmsford, Massachusetts – served as the busy workshops of America’s industrialization in the textile and, also, the leather industries in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Even before the introduction of the steam engine and the electrical generator, complicated, engineering machinery with a matrix of  gears, levers, pulleys, leather straps and chains constituted a modern, assembly-line production center. This complex of machinery  was powered by natural energy sources such as waterfalls, water wheels, diversionary water canals that were provided  with dykes, sluices, gates, etc.

Items of production included linens, curtains, bedsheets and fabrics for the clothing industry. Similar progress could also be seen in the shoe industry where leather was the primary component of production.

Gone were the days of the New England “cottage industries” where many, private  homes were also production centers that had provided an inventory of goods for sale at local distribution centers like the town’s shoe store, a haberdashery or a farmer’s clothing center, etc.

It is noteworthy that all the essential technologies that represented in the 1830s the most basic mechanical assemblage of essential parts had been known to the whole world since the days of Alexander the Great and his Macedonians, circa 330B.C.  Much later, during the Renaissance, technical geniuses like Galileo had clearly outlined the basic operation of these “simple machines” to the enlightenment of his contemporaries.

That period dates back to the 14th century. Curiously, even during the rudimentary days of the burgeoning American restlessness that happened decades before the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, these essential concepts linking technology to science – physics, mostly – were surprisingly unknown to the average American or, indeed,  to the average European.

Science, although extolled by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin was still “terra incognita” to almost everyone alive in those days. Apparently, even good ideas do not easily blossom in the inner workings of the human mind. How does that enthusiasm ever take hold?

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