MOSI Hangout

The other day we had a Google Hangout with some of the museum workers and to prepare for this we did some activities in class.  First we watched a video that Jamie, the museum worker, put up explaining the cloth production and all of the machines.  In class we took notes on all of the important words in this video to learn what they meant so we would be prepared to ask questions.  We had to come up with these questions before the hangout and we had to use the words in the questions.

I learned a lot during this chat, especially about the machines.  For example, I learned what hand cards were, they were two brushes that would brush the wool into straight lines and this was later taken over by the carding engine.  I also learned a interesting fact about the word 'Heirloom'.  It's called an heirloom because back in the day, the loom was considered the most valuable item a family had so it would be passed down generation to generation from father to son and eventually the word heirloom was used for anything that was passed down.  Another machine I learned about is the Arkwright's water frame.  We learned that Arkwright most likely just stole the idea from a poor worker and patented it as his own.  This kind of thing happened a lot, rich people would come and listen to a worker's idea and take it as their own because the workers were not rich enough to patent it themselves.  During the chat Jamie explained all of the dangers of working on the machines and all of the terrible things that happened.  We learned that children would have to clean under the machines and this was dangerous because it took 9 seconds for the machine to go out and it would only stay out for 1 second and then took 3 seconds to come crashing back in.  So the children had very little time to get out and clean before the machine crushed them.  Many kids would get severely injured or killed and one time a young boy couldn't get in and panicked and got up and got chopped in half.  Since this was such a dangerous job the children would try to run away so the mill owners would tie some kids to the machine so they wouldn't flee.  I learned a lot of cool, interesting and some disturbing facts about the mills and machines during the 1700's - 1900's.

Overall I liked this chat and I learned a lot in a fun and interesting way.  I liked how we could ask questions and have conversations with the expert instead of just reading something they published or watching a video because we can have clarifying questions and learn more.  I found it annoying how the call dropped or froze but that happens and I hope we do this again with more experts, I think it is a very helpful and fun thing to do.

MOSI Google Hangout - The Luddites