Housing the Loom, 1790-1850: A study of industrial building and mechanisation in a transitional period

Abstract

The architecture of the textile mill changed radically during the late 18th and 19th centuries. Influences affecting mill design included the way in which production was organised and the degree to which processes were mechanised. This article examines how the industry developed new building types to accommodate looms. In the early period, handlooms were frequently concentrated in distinctive loomshops. The powerloom, introduced in the early 19th century, presented new problems, and in an experimental period different branches of the industry developed different means of housing the new machines. The single-storeyed shed was the dominant building type adopted for powered weaving, but there were in the silk and tape branches prominent examples of factories in which powerlooms were housed in purpose-built multi-storeyed mills.     

Depth records and ocean volumes: Ocean profiling by sounding technology, 1850-1930

Oceanographic research commencing in the mid-19th century could not rely on the direct observation of its object, but had to create its images of ocean depth through remote investigation. Depth became a matter of scientific definitions, systematic measurements, and graphic representations. In the course of a century, the opaque ocean of the 1850s was densely depicted in physical terms and transformed into a technically and scientifically sound oceanic volume. Tracing the history of deep-sea sounding technology from wire sounding around 1850 to acoustic sounding in the early 1920s, the paper investigates the relation and interplay between conceptual, pictorial, and technological depth performance. Addressing the conditions and limitations oceanographers encountered in producing single measurements and arranging them into profiles and contour line charts, the paper takes on a narrative approach to spatial representation: resembling a narrated or written story, the texture of depth depended on the richness and coherence of its plots.     

Immigrants and savers: A rich new database on the Irish in 1850s New York

A new dataset created from the first 18,000 savings accounts opened (from 1850 to 1858) at the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in New York City is described. The bank was founded by Irish Americans, and most of its depositors in its first decade of operations were recent Irish immigrants. The data offer a unique window on both savings behavior by the poor and not-so-poor in antebellum New York and on how emigrants who came primarily from rural parts of Ireland adapted to urban life. They also contain much that is new on the regional origins of mid-nineteenth century Irish immigrants and on their settlement patterns in New York.