Leeds Industrial Museum

Today finds us at Leeds Industrial Museum. We like museums. Especially this one. It used to be a Mill, and not a great place to work.

All around they have put up descriptions of the horrible afflictions inflicted on the workforce. The ear defenders above are for visitors to wear when they fire up the spinning machine. Not something that the employees got. They just had to put up with going deaf after a while. All the machines were powered by a steam engine which turned long shafts that ran along inside the roofline. Canvas belts transferred power to the huge machines that took wool into one end and then produced cloth at the other. There were no covers on the belts or the machine mechanisms. Getting mangled was just something you had to try to avoid doing.

It’s interesting to think that at the time the mill was opened these places would have seemed like the ultimate in technical advancement and heralded as the next great thing. Oh well. It’s not as if our generation would widely adopt new technology without thinking hard about the implications and the effects on people using it..