Looking Into the Industrial Revolution

Our exhibit is a major part of the Industrial Revolution. Each picture on the exhibit represents a different job that the children had to do while they worked in the mills. We put shoes, cotton, and coal on the poster to show how the children didn't wear shoes, worked in cotton factories, and the harsh conditions of coal mines. For the exhibit we used six different sources. The first source was called “Children Had Leather”. It was a photo that showed the mistreatment in factories and how leather belts use to be slung around children to pull loads of coal. The second source was called “Age Distribution In Cotton Factories” and it showed that in 49.9% of children started working in cotton factories when they were under ten years old in 1818. Fortunately in 1819 that percentage decreased to 3.9% of children working under ten years old. The third source was called Children In Coal Mine. Hurriers and Curriers”. This source was also a photo showing the mistreatment of children and how they were not allowed to wear shoes while working in bad conditions. The Fourth source was “Young Helpers In a Georgia Textile Mill”. It was a photo that showed how children worked with bare feet near dangerous equipment and could be seriously injured by the machines. The fifth source was called “Bobbin Girls” and it was an excerpt that described how young girls ran the machines and most parents didn't want to send their kids to work, but they needed the money. The last source we had was another excerpt called the “Factory Act”. This was suppose to help create laws that prevented children from working long hours and in bad conditions.

The title of our exhibit was “Unlawful Conditions, Dangerous Work spaces and Mistreated Children”. We came up with this title by looking at all the different bad conditions the children had to deal with during the Industrial Revolution. We discussed the three topics that we thought were the worst for the children and made it our title. I hope when visitors see our exhibit they will learn how badly children were really treated during the Industrial Revolution. I hope they learn about how young children were when they started working and all the terrible jobs they had to endure. They should see how the Factory Acts helped keep children under ten from working and stopped the unlawful hours and conditions they had to work in. This exhibit should help people see how bad the Industrial Revolution was and how it started to get better towards the end.  

As I walked around the  four other exhibit’s I learned a lot about the other parts of the
 Industrial revolution. The first exhibit I saw was called “weaving Slavery Into The Industrial Revolution” and it had a lot of pictures and showed how slavery contributed to the increase of wealth and products. It also explained how high demands for cotton made slavery in the mills more common. The next exhibit I visited was the “Fueling Transportation In The Industrial Revolution” and I learned that trains could travel through all different kinds of landscapes and reduced travel times. However, the new transportation negatively affected things and they wanted to preserve the nature. Another exhibit was “Changes to Life Conditions Due to the Industrial Revolution” and I learned that because of the factories there was a lot of smoke and air pollution. This lead to the rivers smelling bad, turning brown, and becoming very cloudy during the revolution. The last exhibit I saw was “A New Age is Looming Over the Horizon”. This exhibit showed how the loom made textiles easier and people began to spin in their homes. I also learned that five year old children could run the wheel and kids were separated by age into different working classes. Families were still poor because they only earned six schillings. All four of these exhibits taught me something about the Industrial Revolution that I never knew before.