Curating a Museum

For this project, we worked with a group to create a poster of a museum exhibit about the Industrial Revolution.  We were given topics within the overarching theme of 'innovations and drawbacks of the Revolution.'  My group's exhibit had to do with the steam engine.

Cutting a Railroad Line

This project was very interesting and helpful.  It was fun to learn about the Industrial Revolution while creating a visual presentation of the information we were learning.  We learned about Robert Fulton and his invention of the steam engine, and how this impacted the world - and is still affecting us today.  We also got to learn about other topics when each of the groups hung their posters up and we walked around to look at them.  A couple of the exhibits I looked at had to do with the mechanisation of the spinning wheel and pollution as a result of the revolution. 

The first exhibit had to do with the spinning wheel.  Spinning wool into yarn was usually done by the women in the family,who would then weave it into clothing.  When the spinning wheel became more and more mechanical over time, spinning travelled from households to factories.  This resulted in the textile mills of the industrial revolution.  These mills in turn made textile production much more efficient.  Many people moved from the country to the city, and both populations and jobs within cities skyrocketed.  Mill workers were treated very badly though.  Children as young as five years old worked in the mills, and they worked very hard.

The next exhibit was about pollution and people's reactions to it.  The inventions of the revolution greatly increased production speed and made life easier, but they also polluted the surrounding world.  Most of them ran on coal, and water and air pollution, especially in cities, was entirely too common.  I was surprised that from a description on the group's poster, it seemed as though the rivers were at least as polluted as they are today, if not even more so.  Even in the very beginning of industrialization, people were questioning whether it is right to damage our planet like we are.  One question that remains for me is - if we know that it's wrong and have for a long time, why haven't we found a way to stop pollution?