Tending the Spinning Machines in an Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire Cotton Factory
Workers minding powered spinning frames in a Lancashire cotton mill in the early nineteenth century. These are the machines the Luddites broke — not from hatred of machinery as such, but because frames like these let an unapprenticed hand do work that had been protected by custom and statute.
The Luddites are remembered as men who smashed machines, which is true and explains nothing. What they attacked were specific machines used in a specific way: gig mills and shearing frames, wide stocking frames, powered spinning like the frames shown here, operated by workers who had served no apprenticeship at rates that undercut the trade. Their letters demanded the enforcement of existing law, not its abolition. Parliament answered by repealing the protective statutes and making frame-breaking a capital offence. The image is from the Wellcome Collection. See more on the machine-breakers of England's industrial dawn.
CC BY 4.0 — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
