On March eleventh, eighteen eleven, authorities broke up a demonstration of workers who were rallying for better wages and workplace conditions. That night, the demonstrators smashed knitting machines at a nearby factory. It's recognized as the first Luddite protest. So this seems like a good time to re share our episode on the subject, which is also an old favorite. That's enough of a favorite that I made a tag on our website called smashing Things to include it. At the end of this episode, which originally came out in As We said, we talked about how many employees Instagram has. Instagram has of course been acquired by Facebook since that time, so uh, that number maybe not accurate anymore, but the comparison still pretty much the same. Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how Stop Works dot com. Um, Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'll fry and today we have a listener request from Anna one that I had a little trouble finding information about not for the usual reason, No, for an unusual but funny reason. Yes, the usual reason is that something is either obscure or so long ago that everything is contradictory. This one was difficult because many many people use the word Luddite to mean like some obstinate, foot draggy person who doesn't want to adopt the new technology. Um. And and many of the articles that use the term that way also include just enough Luddite history that it gets tagged that way, and all the databases and so researching about the Luodites means that you have to wade through all kinds of stuff about people not wanting to fancy your phones or new technology geez or like some you know, new massively open online course thing, all kinds or I myself have called myself a lodite when I have to call someone on the phone instead of texting them, like some kind of bloodite. Yeah, it's one of those words. It's been kind of co opted into modern slang. And I think because it sounds inherently funny, just because of the construction of the word. Um, that's why people love it so much. Yes, and while there was an anti technology piece to the Loodite rebellion, that's not really what it was about. It's one small element of a much bigger picture. Right the the idea that that Ludites were just anti machine zealots who dragged their feet against progress and went around smashing things is not really the whole picture at all. So that's what we're going to talk about today, and thanks to Anna for suggesting it. So the Leoodite Uprising was a series of protests in Northern Land in which workers smashed machines in mills and factories. So this wasn't the first organized violence against machinery, and England wasn't the only place where people took to breaking machines to try to protest something. But the Luddites are, of all the machine breakers, the most famous ones and the really the only ones whose name became synonymous was something. Yeah, we've talked about it even a little bit in another podcast. We talked about it in the Sewing Machine podcast. The word sabotage comes from the word for shoe subo, which got thrown into things. But the Luddites are exactly what you said. They have become completely synonymous with this anti machinery, violent hatred for it when it's not, you know, not so much what it was about. So, yeah, this was taking place we should contextualize in the early nineteenth century, so it's towards the end of the Industrial Revolution. The American War for Independence was still a pretty recent memory, and the Napoleonic Wars between England and France had been going on for a while. So in England money was really tight. Times were pretty hard, and food was becoming scarce and expensive, and the French Revolution was also in the very recent past, so the people in charge were more anxious than usual about the idea of poor people rising up against rich people. It was a time of general unrest and mistrust right and the War of eighteen twelve was looming at this point. So in addition to no longer trading with France, England also wasn't trading with the young United States, and the textile industry was really suffering as a result. The increased work that was coming from putting clothing on soldiers was not making up for the drop in trade. Uh And in addition, trade unions had been outlawed by the Combination Acts of seventeen eighteen hundred, so people were not allowed to band together to try to get an increase in pay or a decrease in hours, or to strike. The penalty was jail time or hard labor, and if you gave some money to somebody who had been convicted to help them out, you could actually be fined for your charitable inclination. On top of the legal issues with unionizing, when labor disputes came up, there wasn't always some kind of central place to go in protest or to raise concerns. Um Some larger factories had been built, but a lot of aspects of textile work we're still really a cottage industry. So when people were doing their work at home or in a small mill that was operated by just a couple of people, there wasn't really one juggernaut of an employer where people could go in petition for change. So when you're a knitter working out of your home, you can't really just have a picket line of one out in your front yard. I mean you could, but it would not be a very effective form of protests, so we wouldn't probably make the statement you were aiming for. No. Uh and machines get a lot of the spotlight in the Ladite uprising, but the mechanization in question had really started a full two hundred years earlier, when William Lee invented the stocking frame. And this was a machine that many people feared would put traditional knitters out of work. The concern was great enough that Queen Elizabeth the First actually denied lea patent and outlawed the frames production, saying quote, I have too much love for my poor people who obtained their bread by the employment of knitting, to give my money to forward an invention that will tend to their ruin, which is a lovely sentiment on her part. A lot of her successors shared this sentiment and continued to support traditional production over machine production. But by the turn of the nineteenth century, manufacturers are starting to defy the law and mechanize anyway. At first, workers took a legal course of action, and they raised money to lobby Parliament to try to keep mechanization illegal, but their efforts failed, and Parliament repealed the laws that were on the books in eighteen o nine. But the stocking frame, along with other improvements, ultimately allowed the textile industry to grow, and in terms of overall numbers, it created more jobs than it eliminated in the very long But in the short term people were losing their jobs, and at the same time, mechanization had sparked a number of disputes over wages and working conditions and the quality of work, and these disputes were really at the heart of the Luddite complaints. A good example of the wage issue came from the manufacture of wool cloth. Before mechanization, skilled laborers called croppers would use tools, some of which weighed about fifty pounds, to smooth out the surface of the wool. This required both strength and skill, and so experienced croppers could demand higher wages than a lot of other textile workers could. But when cropping machines were invented, traditional croppers weren't needed anymore, and the other jobs that were being created required less skill and therefore paid less money. So as cropping machines became widespread, many croppers just wound up unemployed. They also had a reputation for being unsavory and rowdy, and the croppers made up some of the most violent Luddites. Conditions in newly opened factories were very often really not what you would categorize as ideal, and many of them. Workers were required to live in dormitories, and those spaces were very cramped intended to be dirty. People would have their pay docked for all kinds of really seemingly insignificant infractions, and the hours were really long and the work was really tedious, so it while it may have given you a living wage, it was not a very enjoyable life that you were leading at that point. And then there's the question of quality. Framework knitters, for example, had been making garments entirely on frames, so to make stockings they would use the frame to knit a tube of material. But new mechanization and manufacturing techniques were making it possible to cut garments out that used to be made on the frame out of a large piece of cloth and then stitched them together. These were known as cut ups, and they required less skill to make, and the workers and a lot of other people really perceived them to be of much lower quality than things that had been made as one piece. And that's still the case, you know, and Coultur work things that are actually certified as Coultur, Like there are lace pieces that are no seams, and then if there's a lot of seeming and piecing, it's seen as less So it's still a consistent mindset about how things are assembled. In terms of textile workers were really angry about the decline and quality I mean people, the wages and the living conditions get a lot of attention, but there was a lot of anger about Okay, now this is less good work. Why are you making us do work that's not as good? Yeah, they didn't want their industry to go downhill. Uh. And workers didn't like that that the people were being employed in the garment industry that weren't apprenticed first. So it factors into that whole quality issue. Uh. This practice was known as culting, and the quality of the work was poor in part because people weren't actually trained to do it. They hadn't gone through that apprenticeship period to learn their trade. They just got put in the factory floor. So while the Luddites have a reputation for being anti machine, and a hallmark of the Luddite uprising was smashing machines to bits, it wasn't the machines themselves that were the problem. The Luodites were fine with machines as long as the people using them were trained to do it well and safely, and had fair wages and working hours, and as long as the introduction of machines wasn't erasing more jobs than it created or cranking out poor quality kids. There were many trades people who took part in the Laddite protests, but croppers, hand loom weavers and knitters, who were the ones most affected by mechanization at the time, were the most prominent. Exactly which workers were at the forefront varied based on which trades were most practiced in any particular area. From the second chapter of Charlotte Bronte's novel Surely, which was published about forty years later and was set during the Ledite uprising, quote, it would not do to stop the progress of invention, to damage science by discouraging its improvements. The war could not be terminated. Efficient relief could not be raised. There was no help then, So the unemployed underwent their destiny, ate the bread and drank the waters of affliction. Misery generates hate. These sufferers hated the machines which they believed took their bread from them. They hated the buildings which contained those machines. They hated the manufacturers who owned those buildings. So that's the context for the protest which started on March eleventh, eighteen eleven. That's when protesters in Nottingham got together to demand better wages and British troops had to break up the demonstration, but the protesters didn't just go home peacefully once they had been dispersed. That night, they broke into a factory in a nearby town and smashed all the machines. Although the name Luddite hadn't been coined yet, history generally marks this as the first Luddite protest, and from there, operating under cover of night, people smash machines in factory ease and sometimes even set factories on fire as part of their demonstrations. There wasn't a lot of local law enforcement at the time. Towns didn't really have a police force to call on, so most of the response wound up coming from the military and from the owners of the mills, who armed themselves and hired men to help defend their property. By January of eighteen twelve, protests were occurring pretty much every night, and they spread to Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. From there they moved to Leicestershire and Derbyshire, and the government dispatched three thousand troops to try to stop these protests. For a sense of what was going on at these incidents, here's an example of a reward poster from January twelve which offered two hundred pounds for knowledge about a frame breaking incident, Whereas on Thursday night last, about ten o'clock, a great number of men armed with pistols, hammers and clubs entered the dwelling house of George Ball Framework, net of Linton, near Nottingham, disguised with masks and handkerchiefs over their faces and in other ways. And after striking and abusing the said George Ball, they wantonly and feloniously broke and destroyed five stocking frames standing in the workshop, four of which belonged to George Ball, and one frame forty gauge belonging to Mr Francis Breathwaite Hosier, all of which we're working at the full price. The poster also a test that workman Thomas Rue, John Jackson and Thomas Naylor were working on the frames at the time, being paid and had no complaint with either George Ball or Francis Breathwaite. Soldiers started raiding houses and they were setting ambushes to try to stop these protests, and Parliament saw machine breaking is such a threat to Northern England that it made machine breaking a capital crime Among this law's detractors in Parliament was Lord Byron, whose first speech in the House of Lords was against the death penalty for machine break. I just want to take a moment to note here that we had gone from the Queen saying that she would not allow machines to be made because it was taking the livelihood of poor people too. If you break a machine, we will hang you. That is that is the spect the trajectory we've gone through rather rapidly. Right. So violence escalated, with protesters and factory people taking shots at one another. When Luddites were killed during demonstrations, they would retaliate by killing the mills owners. April of eighteen twelve was a particularly bloody month in Manchester. A mill owner ordered his men to fire into a crowd of protesters who were threatening his factory's machines. At least three people died and eighteen were wounded. The next day, soldiers killed at least five more people. On April eleven, William Cartwright, who was owner of Rawford's mill, fortified the mill with things like iron bars and a vat of acid to pour on protesters. He had been appointed as a constable to supplement the army in the militia about a month before, and he gathered soldiers and attacked a group of about a hundred protesters who were approaching the mill. Two of the protesters were killed. This protest was one of the most prominent events in the Luddite uprising in the West Riding, and it was one of the inspirations for Charlotte Bronte's novel Shirley, which we quoted from earlier. On the twenty April, William Horsefall, a manufacturer who had boasted that he would ride up to his saddle in Luddite blood, was killed in an ambush. Joseph Radcliffe, a magistrate, called in more troops to fight the protesters and put the area under martial law. Radcliffe was eventually given a baronetcy for his work during the Ledite riots. In spite of the presence of troops for much of the Ludite riot riots, it was hard for officials to get things under control. The Luddites were doing most of their machines smashing at night while masked, and they usually had the support of the local people, so a lot of times they were protected from the legal force as who were hunting them down and Although the movement was relatively coordinated, there wasn't one central leadership that the army could find and capture to put an end to the whole thing. By May of eighteen twelve, fourteen thousand, four hundred troops had been sent to fight these riots. The military force in England became bigger than Wellington's army in Portugal, and it was far bigger than any military force ever used to fight domestic unrest in England. As the protest escalated, Loodites were arrested and tried, with the courts trying to make an example of the people who were on trial to discourage further protests. Bloodites were sentenced to prison, transported to Australia, or hanged. Eventually, Benjamin Walker, William Thorpe, Thomas Smith, and George Miller confessed to being involved in the murder of William Horsfall. Walker earned King's evidence and the other three men were hanged the following January. Another man, William Hall, turned King's evidence in both the Horsefall investigation and the investigation into the attack on Rawford's mill, and he betrayed sixteen other Luddites to the Crown. When the defendants were tried and the Rawford's Mill attack. The jury didn't even adjourn for deliberation. They talked about among themselves for a moment before delivering a guilty verdict against eight defendants. In May of eighteen twelve, several defendants were tried at a special commission in Lancashire, but none of them on charges of machine breaking. Most of the charges were for food riots, arson and making illegal oaths. Even so, eight people were sentenced to death and seventeen were sentenced to transportation to Australia. Seven others were sentenced to prison. The courts weren't the only ones trying to frighten the protesters and to staying in line. Leaders of the movement were also using scare tactics of their own. In some areas, Luddites took an oath that they reveal Luddite secrets, they would be quote sent out of the world by the first brother who shall meet me, and my name and character blotted out of existence, never to be remembered, but with contempt and abhorrence. So people were reluctant to blow the whistle on Luddites that they knew either because of genuine support for the movement, or because they feared the retribution indicated in that oath. In the summer of eighteen twelve, General Thomas Maitland came to put the rebellion down. He offered pardons to people who renounced Luddism and money to the people who informed on other protesters. Since the light activities were really happening at night, he ordered the troops to fight them at night. Soldiers broke up meetings and imprisoned protesters, and anonymous person sent Maitland a letter that that September detailing a number of public houses where Luddites met, and there were of course raids followed by arrests. As a consequence. Sixty four men stood trial at York Castle in eighteen thirteen. Seventeen were executed for machine breaking, twenty five were sent to Australia for giving or receiving illegal oaths. Twenty two were acquitted or released on bail, and that's when the Luddite rebellion really started to dissipate. The peak of the Luddite activity was in eighteen eleven and eighteen twelve, but protests continued until eighteen sixteen. The textile industry continued on its path of mechanization, and the rebellion failed in all of its aims. It didn't stop mechanization, It didn't save people's jobs or wages. It didn't reverse the trend of manufacturers making lower quality goods. It didn't change working conditions in fledgling factories. They really failed on all accounts, and many of them lost their lives doing it. Yes, and yet while the protest was still a failure, and you know, it wasn't the first riot like this in history, the Luddite name has lasted for two hundred years, unlike all of the other machine breaking incidents. Uh, the word Luddite, as we said earlier, became synonymous was something that relates to, although is not exactly the same as what the original protest was all about. Today, there's also a neo Luddite movement that centers on the idea that technology's central place in our lives is damaging some of this linguistic staying power, maybe thanks to the flare for lack of a better word, that the Luddites put into their protests. They were so passionate, and it's such an it's an image that's so easy to conjure in your mind of someone smashing a machine, tibits that it just naturally people make the association, and it's yeah, well, and then rather be rather than being an unruly smash and grab mob. They targeted which mills to go after, and then they disguised themselves to do so. And they also wild disguised did military style drills on the moors at night. And they communicated through secret hand signals, using gestures to send messages and identify one another, as well as conveying poems and songs to each other. You can still find a lot of the lyrics to these online. Uh. The name came about through the mythic character of ned Lud, also known as Captain Lud, General Lud, or King Luod. The first known use of this name in the context of the protests came in November of eighteen eleven. It probably stems from an incident that allegedly took place twenty two years before, when an apprentice whose last name was Lud or Ludlum smashed a stocking frame in rage after being told to square his needles. So his name kind of stuck and became the name of this mythic leader of the movement, even though he had nothing to do with it. He had nothing to do with it, and there was no Luod leading the riots when they actually happened. The story spread and this fictionalized Luod became the face, though invisible, of the movement. King Lud become a became a mythic figure who, just like Robin Hood, lived in Sherwood Forest of all places, and he wrote taunting letters from his office us there, all of which was fictional. Yeah. Uh. The Ladites were also quotable. In one protest, the Ldites were using giant sledge hammers to break them to break machines in Yorkshire. They named these these hammers Great Enoch, after Enoch Taylor, who ran the firm that made the sledge hammers and also owned the machines that they were destroying. They had a rallying cry of Enoch made them, Enoch will break them. And they also protested in dresses um and called themselves General Lud's wives when they did this just sort of an odd image of these men in drag with giant hammers, chanting and destroying things. Well, and all these things together kind of made it a protest that had character, which I think is one of the reasons that it has more staying power in people's minds than some of the other machine breaking protests. A lot of the Leadites who evaded capture were really deeply reluctant to talk about it for years after because they feared punishment. This may also have added to this air of mystery about it. Although around the eighteen seventies, as many of the Luddites reached their very later years, some of them did start start to tell their stories and revive some of the Luddite lore. So today a Luddite wouldn't say something along the lines of I don't want an iPhone more like and admittedly this is something of an Apple's to Oranges comparison, uh, they would make between Kodak, which employed one and forty thousand people, in Instagram, which employs about a dozen, or the way newspapers have fallen in the face of the Internet becoming so popular and accessible. Yeah, or just this morning, um, I saw an article that was correlating the rise and capital expenses on things like robots and technology and a drop in paying actual human labor as a global trend having gone on since the nineteen eighties. That is the sort of thing that would lead to a neo lud I protest today more so than I don't want the latest operating systems, no new things. King Leod may rise again. So yes, that is the story of the Luddite movement. Different than people probably suspect in any way. Yes, definitely different than the colloquial use of Luddite. Well, and I think some people associate them with and this is completely wrong, of course, the Amish. I think there was a I mean, I've had people say that when I'm like, we're going to talk about the Luodites. Were they like the Amish? Not at all? Really not really, we really didn't have a problem with machines if the machines were used. Well yeah, thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that maybe obs eleape. Now, so here's our current contact information. We are at History Podcasts, at how Stuff Works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History. All over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot com

On March eleventh, eighteen eleven, authorities broke up a demonstration of workers who were rallying for better wages and workplace conditions. That night, the demonstrators smashed knitting machines at a nearby factory. It's recognized as the first Luddite protest. So this seems like a good time to re share our episode on the subject, which is also an old favorite. That's enough of a favorite that I made a tag on our website called smashing Things to include it. At the end of this episode, which originally came out in As We said, we talked about how many employees Instagram has. Instagram has of course been acquired by Facebook since that time, so uh, that number maybe not accurate anymore, but the comparison still pretty much the same. Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from how Stop Works dot com. Um, Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'll fry and today we have a listener request from Anna one that I had a little trouble finding information about not for the usual reason, No, for an unusual but funny reason. Yes, the usual reason is that something is either obscure or so long ago that everything is contradictory. This one was difficult because many many people use the word Luddite to mean like some obstinate, foot draggy person who doesn't want to adopt the new technology. Um. And and many of the articles that use the term that way also include just enough Luddite history that it gets tagged that way, and all the databases and so researching about the Luodites means that you have to wade through all kinds of stuff about people not wanting to fancy your phones or new technology geez or like some you know, new massively open online course thing, all kinds or I myself have called myself a lodite when I have to call someone on the phone instead of texting them, like some kind of bloodite. Yeah, it's one of those words. It's been kind of co opted into modern slang. And I think because it sounds inherently funny, just because of the construction of the word. Um, that's why people love it so much. Yes, and while there was an anti technology piece to the Loodite rebellion, that's not really what it was about. It's one small element of a much bigger picture. Right the the idea that that Ludites were just anti machine zealots who dragged their feet against progress and went around smashing things is not really the whole picture at all. So that's what we're going to talk about today, and thanks to Anna for suggesting it. So the Leoodite Uprising was a series of protests in Northern Land in which workers smashed machines in mills and factories. So this wasn't the first organized violence against machinery, and England wasn't the only place where people took to breaking machines to try to protest something. But the Luddites are, of all the machine breakers, the most famous ones and the really the only ones whose name became synonymous was something. Yeah, we've talked about it even a little bit in another podcast. We talked about it in the Sewing Machine podcast. The word sabotage comes from the word for shoe subo, which got thrown into things. But the Luddites are exactly what you said. They have become completely synonymous with this anti machinery, violent hatred for it when it's not, you know, not so much what it was about. So, yeah, this was taking place we should contextualize in the early nineteenth century, so it's towards the end of the Industrial Revolution. The American War for Independence was still a pretty recent memory, and the Napoleonic Wars between England and France had been going on for a while. So in England money was really tight. Times were pretty hard, and food was becoming scarce and expensive, and the French Revolution was also in the very recent past, so the people in charge were more anxious than usual about the idea of poor people rising up against rich people. It was a time of general unrest and mistrust right and the War of eighteen twelve was looming at this point. So in addition to no longer trading with France, England also wasn't trading with the young United States, and the textile industry was really suffering as a result. The increased work that was coming from putting clothing on soldiers was not making up for the drop in trade. Uh And in addition, trade unions had been outlawed by the Combination Acts of seventeen eighteen hundred, so people were not allowed to band together to try to get an increase in pay or a decrease in hours, or to strike. The penalty was jail time or hard labor, and if you gave some money to somebody who had been convicted to help them out, you could actually be fined for your charitable inclination. On top of the legal issues with unionizing, when labor disputes came up, there wasn't always some kind of central place to go in protest or to raise concerns. Um Some larger factories had been built, but a lot of aspects of textile work we're still really a cottage industry. So when people were doing their work at home or in a small mill that was operated by just a couple of people, there wasn't really one juggernaut of an employer where people could go in petition for change. So when you're a knitter working out of your home, you can't really just have a picket line of one out in your front yard. I mean you could, but it would not be a very effective form of protests, so we wouldn't probably make the statement you were aiming for. No. Uh and machines get a lot of the spotlight in the Ladite uprising, but the mechanization in question had really started a full two hundred years earlier, when William Lee invented the stocking frame. And this was a machine that many people feared would put traditional knitters out of work. The concern was great enough that Queen Elizabeth the First actually denied lea patent and outlawed the frames production, saying quote, I have too much love for my poor people who obtained their bread by the employment of knitting, to give my money to forward an invention that will tend to their ruin, which is a lovely sentiment on her part. A lot of her successors shared this sentiment and continued to support traditional production over machine production. But by the turn of the nineteenth century, manufacturers are starting to defy the law and mechanize anyway. At first, workers took a legal course of action, and they raised money to lobby Parliament to try to keep mechanization illegal, but their efforts failed, and Parliament repealed the laws that were on the books in eighteen o nine. But the stocking frame, along with other improvements, ultimately allowed the textile industry to grow, and in terms of overall numbers, it created more jobs than it eliminated in the very long But in the short term people were losing their jobs, and at the same time, mechanization had sparked a number of disputes over wages and working conditions and the quality of work, and these disputes were really at the heart of the Luddite complaints. A good example of the wage issue came from the manufacture of wool cloth. Before mechanization, skilled laborers called croppers would use tools, some of which weighed about fifty pounds, to smooth out the surface of the wool. This required both strength and skill, and so experienced croppers could demand higher wages than a lot of other textile workers could. But when cropping machines were invented, traditional croppers weren't needed anymore, and the other jobs that were being created required less skill and therefore paid less money. So as cropping machines became widespread, many croppers just wound up unemployed. They also had a reputation for being unsavory and rowdy, and the croppers made up some of the most violent Luddites. Conditions in newly opened factories were very often really not what you would categorize as ideal, and many of them. Workers were required to live in dormitories, and those spaces were very cramped intended to be dirty. People would have their pay docked for all kinds of really seemingly insignificant infractions, and the hours were really long and the work was really tedious, so it while it may have given you a living wage, it was not a very enjoyable life that you were leading at that point. And then there's the question of quality. Framework knitters, for example, had been making garments entirely on frames, so to make stockings they would use the frame to knit a tube of material. But new mechanization and manufacturing techniques were making it possible to cut garments out that used to be made on the frame out of a large piece of cloth and then stitched them together. These were known as cut ups, and they required less skill to make, and the workers and a lot of other people really perceived them to be of much lower quality than things that had been made as one piece. And that's still the case, you know, and Coultur work things that are actually certified as Coultur, Like there are lace pieces that are no seams, and then if there's a lot of seeming and piecing, it's seen as less So it's still a consistent mindset about how things are assembled. In terms of textile workers were really angry about the decline and quality I mean people, the wages and the living conditions get a lot of attention, but there was a lot of anger about Okay, now this is less good work. Why are you making us do work that's not as good? Yeah, they didn't want their industry to go downhill. Uh. And workers didn't like that that the people were being employed in the garment industry that weren't apprenticed first. So it factors into that whole quality issue. Uh. This practice was known as culting, and the quality of the work was poor in part because people weren't actually trained to do it. They hadn't gone through that apprenticeship period to learn their trade. They just got put in the factory floor. So while the Luddites have a reputation for being anti machine, and a hallmark of the Luddite uprising was smashing machines to bits, it wasn't the machines themselves that were the problem. The Luodites were fine with machines as long as the people using them were trained to do it well and safely, and had fair wages and working hours, and as long as the introduction of machines wasn't erasing more jobs than it created or cranking out poor quality kids. There were many trades people who took part in the Laddite protests, but croppers, hand loom weavers and knitters, who were the ones most affected by mechanization at the time, were the most prominent. Exactly which workers were at the forefront varied based on which trades were most practiced in any particular area. From the second chapter of Charlotte Bronte's novel Surely, which was published about forty years later and was set during the Ledite uprising, quote, it would not do to stop the progress of invention, to damage science by discouraging its improvements. The war could not be terminated. Efficient relief could not be raised. There was no help then, So the unemployed underwent their destiny, ate the bread and drank the waters of affliction. Misery generates hate. These sufferers hated the machines which they believed took their bread from them. They hated the buildings which contained those machines. They hated the manufacturers who owned those buildings. So that's the context for the protest which started on March eleventh, eighteen eleven. That's when protesters in Nottingham got together to demand better wages and British troops had to break up the demonstration, but the protesters didn't just go home peacefully once they had been dispersed. That night, they broke into a factory in a nearby town and smashed all the machines. Although the name Luddite hadn't been coined yet, history generally marks this as the first Luddite protest, and from there, operating under cover of night, people smash machines in factory ease and sometimes even set factories on fire as part of their demonstrations. There wasn't a lot of local law enforcement at the time. Towns didn't really have a police force to call on, so most of the response wound up coming from the military and from the owners of the mills, who armed themselves and hired men to help defend their property. By January of eighteen twelve, protests were occurring pretty much every night, and they spread to Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. From there they moved to Leicestershire and Derbyshire, and the government dispatched three thousand troops to try to stop these protests. For a sense of what was going on at these incidents, here's an example of a reward poster from January twelve which offered two hundred pounds for knowledge about a frame breaking incident, Whereas on Thursday night last, about ten o'clock, a great number of men armed with pistols, hammers and clubs entered the dwelling house of George Ball Framework, net of Linton, near Nottingham, disguised with masks and handkerchiefs over their faces and in other ways. And after striking and abusing the said George Ball, they wantonly and feloniously broke and destroyed five stocking frames standing in the workshop, four of which belonged to George Ball, and one frame forty gauge belonging to Mr Francis Breathwaite Hosier, all of which we're working at the full price. The poster also a test that workman Thomas Rue, John Jackson and Thomas Naylor were working on the frames at the time, being paid and had no complaint with either George Ball or Francis Breathwaite. Soldiers started raiding houses and they were setting ambushes to try to stop these protests, and Parliament saw machine breaking is such a threat to Northern England that it made machine breaking a capital crime Among this law's detractors in Parliament was Lord Byron, whose first speech in the House of Lords was against the death penalty for machine break. I just want to take a moment to note here that we had gone from the Queen saying that she would not allow machines to be made because it was taking the livelihood of poor people too. If you break a machine, we will hang you. That is that is the spect the trajectory we've gone through rather rapidly. Right. So violence escalated, with protesters and factory people taking shots at one another. When Luddites were killed during demonstrations, they would retaliate by killing the mills owners. April of eighteen twelve was a particularly bloody month in Manchester. A mill owner ordered his men to fire into a crowd of protesters who were threatening his factory's machines. At least three people died and eighteen were wounded. The next day, soldiers killed at least five more people. On April eleven, William Cartwright, who was owner of Rawford's mill, fortified the mill with things like iron bars and a vat of acid to pour on protesters. He had been appointed as a constable to supplement the army in the militia about a month before, and he gathered soldiers and attacked a group of about a hundred protesters who were approaching the mill. Two of the protesters were killed. This protest was one of the most prominent events in the Luddite uprising in the West Riding, and it was one of the inspirations for Charlotte Bronte's novel Shirley, which we quoted from earlier. On the twenty April, William Horsefall, a manufacturer who had boasted that he would ride up to his saddle in Luddite blood, was killed in an ambush. Joseph Radcliffe, a magistrate, called in more troops to fight the protesters and put the area under martial law. Radcliffe was eventually given a baronetcy for his work during the Ledite riots. In spite of the presence of troops for much of the Ludite riot riots, it was hard for officials to get things under control. The Luddites were doing most of their machines smashing at night while masked, and they usually had the support of the local people, so a lot of times they were protected from the legal force as who were hunting them down and Although the movement was relatively coordinated, there wasn't one central leadership that the army could find and capture to put an end to the whole thing. By May of eighteen twelve, fourteen thousand, four hundred troops had been sent to fight these riots. The military force in England became bigger than Wellington's army in Portugal, and it was far bigger than any military force ever used to fight domestic unrest in England. As the protest escalated, Loodites were arrested and tried, with the courts trying to make an example of the people who were on trial to discourage further protests. Bloodites were sentenced to prison, transported to Australia, or hanged. Eventually, Benjamin Walker, William Thorpe, Thomas Smith, and George Miller confessed to being involved in the murder of William Horsfall. Walker earned King's evidence and the other three men were hanged the following January. Another man, William Hall, turned King's evidence in both the Horsefall investigation and the investigation into the attack on Rawford's mill, and he betrayed sixteen other Luddites to the Crown. When the defendants were tried and the Rawford's Mill attack. The jury didn't even adjourn for deliberation. They talked about among themselves for a moment before delivering a guilty verdict against eight defendants. In May of eighteen twelve, several defendants were tried at a special commission in Lancashire, but none of them on charges of machine breaking. Most of the charges were for food riots, arson and making illegal oaths. Even so, eight people were sentenced to death and seventeen were sentenced to transportation to Australia. Seven others were sentenced to prison. The courts weren't the only ones trying to frighten the protesters and to staying in line. Leaders of the movement were also using scare tactics of their own. In some areas, Luddites took an oath that they reveal Luddite secrets, they would be quote sent out of the world by the first brother who shall meet me, and my name and character blotted out of existence, never to be remembered, but with contempt and abhorrence. So people were reluctant to blow the whistle on Luddites that they knew either because of genuine support for the movement, or because they feared the retribution indicated in that oath. In the summer of eighteen twelve, General Thomas Maitland came to put the rebellion down. He offered pardons to people who renounced Luddism and money to the people who informed on other protesters. Since the light activities were really happening at night, he ordered the troops to fight them at night. Soldiers broke up meetings and imprisoned protesters, and anonymous person sent Maitland a letter that that September detailing a number of public houses where Luddites met, and there were of course raids followed by arrests. As a consequence. Sixty four men stood trial at York Castle in eighteen thirteen. Seventeen were executed for machine breaking, twenty five were sent to Australia for giving or receiving illegal oaths. Twenty two were acquitted or released on bail, and that's when the Luddite rebellion really started to dissipate. The peak of the Luddite activity was in eighteen eleven and eighteen twelve, but protests continued until eighteen sixteen. The textile industry continued on its path of mechanization, and the rebellion failed in all of its aims. It didn't stop mechanization, It didn't save people's jobs or wages. It didn't reverse the trend of manufacturers making lower quality goods. It didn't change working conditions in fledgling factories. They really failed on all accounts, and many of them lost their lives doing it. Yes, and yet while the protest was still a failure, and you know, it wasn't the first riot like this in history, the Luddite name has lasted for two hundred years, unlike all of the other machine breaking incidents. Uh, the word Luddite, as we said earlier, became synonymous was something that relates to, although is not exactly the same as what the original protest was all about. Today, there's also a neo Luddite movement that centers on the idea that technology's central place in our lives is damaging some of this linguistic staying power, maybe thanks to the flare for lack of a better word, that the Luddites put into their protests. They were so passionate, and it's such an it's an image that's so easy to conjure in your mind of someone smashing a machine, tibits that it just naturally people make the association, and it's yeah, well, and then rather be rather than being an unruly smash and grab mob. They targeted which mills to go after, and then they disguised themselves to do so. And they also wild disguised did military style drills on the moors at night. And they communicated through secret hand signals, using gestures to send messages and identify one another, as well as conveying poems and songs to each other. You can still find a lot of the lyrics to these online. Uh. The name came about through the mythic character of ned Lud, also known as Captain Lud, General Lud, or King Luod. The first known use of this name in the context of the protests came in November of eighteen eleven. It probably stems from an incident that allegedly took place twenty two years before, when an apprentice whose last name was Lud or Ludlum smashed a stocking frame in rage after being told to square his needles. So his name kind of stuck and became the name of this mythic leader of the movement, even though he had nothing to do with it. He had nothing to do with it, and there was no Luod leading the riots when they actually happened. The story spread and this fictionalized Luod became the face, though invisible, of the movement. King Lud become a became a mythic figure who, just like Robin Hood, lived in Sherwood Forest of all places, and he wrote taunting letters from his office us there, all of which was fictional. Yeah. Uh. The Ladites were also quotable. In one protest, the Ldites were using giant sledge hammers to break them to break machines in Yorkshire. They named these these hammers Great Enoch, after Enoch Taylor, who ran the firm that made the sledge hammers and also owned the machines that they were destroying. They had a rallying cry of Enoch made them, Enoch will break them. And they also protested in dresses um and called themselves General Lud's wives when they did this just sort of an odd image of these men in drag with giant hammers, chanting and destroying things. Well, and all these things together kind of made it a protest that had character, which I think is one of the reasons that it has more staying power in people's minds than some of the other machine breaking protests. A lot of the Leadites who evaded capture were really deeply reluctant to talk about it for years after because they feared punishment. This may also have added to this air of mystery about it. Although around the eighteen seventies, as many of the Luddites reached their very later years, some of them did start start to tell their stories and revive some of the Luddite lore. So today a Luddite wouldn't say something along the lines of I don't want an iPhone more like and admittedly this is something of an Apple's to Oranges comparison, uh, they would make between Kodak, which employed one and forty thousand people, in Instagram, which employs about a dozen, or the way newspapers have fallen in the face of the Internet becoming so popular and accessible. Yeah, or just this morning, um, I saw an article that was correlating the rise and capital expenses on things like robots and technology and a drop in paying actual human labor as a global trend having gone on since the nineteen eighties. That is the sort of thing that would lead to a neo lud I protest today more so than I don't want the latest operating systems, no new things. King Leod may rise again. So yes, that is the story of the Luddite movement. Different than people probably suspect in any way. Yes, definitely different than the colloquial use of Luddite. Well, and I think some people associate them with and this is completely wrong, of course, the Amish. I think there was a I mean, I've had people say that when I'm like, we're going to talk about the Luodites. Were they like the Amish? Not at all? Really not really, we really didn't have a problem with machines if the machines were used. Well yeah, thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that maybe obs eleape. Now, so here's our current contact information. We are at History Podcasts, at how Stuff Works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History. All over social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. 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