In colonial times, all the way up into the 1820’s the main system used to produce finished, textiles was the putting-out system. It consisted of many people working in homes and producing goods for a certain person in order for them to produce the final product. Francis Cabot Lowell thought of a much better system, a factory-based system where all the processes of making textiles was done in one big facility. Francis Cabot Lowell was a major contributor in the formation of the industrial revolution due to the creation of the factory system.
Francis Cabot Lowell was born in 1775 in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Lowell was part of the prominent family of the Boston Brahmins. He later would become a very successful merchant and would travel to England at age 36. He was extraordinarily impressed by the textile mills in the larger cities there.(www.pbs.org). He would learn to realize that he could make them even better.
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Francis also memorized the basis of the English power loom and would adopt it to use in the factories he was going to set up back home. This is why he decided to make his own textile factory in Massachusetts. He set the factories up so that they were able to use the spinning jenny to spin the cotton into thread, then a power loom was used weave the threads into actual cloth. Lowell’s factory was mainly staffed by women, these women grew to be known as “The Lowell Girls”. These women, and sometimes mere girls were offered jobs at the factory because Lowell knew he could pay them very low wages since they were just farmhands that wanted an opportunity in the