Immigrants And Children During The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution is a term generally applied to the extraordinary transformation in the production, transportation, and communication through the substitution of mechanical manufacture for hard labor. This revolution gave way to a stream of inventors and investors, from Rockefeller, to Carnegie, to Thomas Edison. The start of the Industrial Revolution is often credited to Samuel Slater. He opened the first industrial mill, in the U.S., in the year 1790. It was based on a British mill. Most of the products people use today are byproducts of the Industrial Revolution. About the time of the American Revolution, the citizens of England started using machines to produce the everyday things that everyone used. Shortly after, locomotives
So factories were created and immigrants and children worked these factories. This was one of the many problems that went on in the Industrial Revolution. These immigrants and children worked around dangerous equipment and machinery. Sometimes they were killed or injured. They worked for little to no pay. Children as young as six years old labored. These immigrants and kids could work up to nineteen hours a day. Not until the Factory Act of 1833, passed by Parliament, did things start to look up. Children were stilled paid a fraction of what adults were paid for doing the same job though. The treatment of kids in these factories was often cruel and unusual. Their safety was generally neglected. If they were late, the adults they served would beat or neglect them. There were people in this time period that advocated for the abolishment of child labor, or at least the improvement of conditions. Factory owners were all for child labor and they made the argument that it was good for the economy. When Parliament passed the Factory Act of 1833, the amount of hours children could work, depending on their age. Kids nine to thirteen could only work eight hours a day, while teenagers fourteen to eighteen were not allowed to work more than twelve hours a day. Children under nine years old were not allowed to work at all. Also, the children were to attend school no less than two hours a day.
In this mill town, female workers were employed to speed up the production rate of products. Production was dramatically increased in New England textile mills. Raw materials were in high demand in the textile industry all over the world, as well as manual labor for large, government run projects. The most famous government run project was the Erie Canal. The three-hundred- sixty-four mile waterway, made completely by human hands in 1817, flowed between Albany and Buffalo, New York. Production was increased even more because of this, since travel was made to be faster. Since the rise in production and the faster rate of transportation, society in general does everything at a faster rate. The invention of steam engines paved the way for many other forms of transportation, including steamships, the automobile, planes, and the light rail. There were also developments in nonindustrial areas, including agriculture, the economy, and social