![]() (In their letters of protest, the Luddites often referred to the new equipment as "frames," a reference to the fact that fabric looms looked like the outside edges of a hollow box, on which yarn was strung for weaving or knitting. ![]() The original Luddites also criticized owners of the new machines for replacing highly skilled workers with people with far less training or experience, even though the machines had taken over some of the skilled tasks needed to make yarn and fabric by hand. ![]() The vandals came to be known as "Luddites," a word that has come to mean people who reject technical innovation. In 1811 near Nottingham, England, a group of workers who made knee-high stockings that were commonly worn with short trousers (called breeches) reacted to these changes by breaking into factories and wrecking the new machines. With fewer workers needed to produce the same amount of goods, jobs in textiles became harder to find. ![]() People skilled at making yarn or fabric with traditional hand-operated spinning machines or looms soon discovered that with the new equipment, one or two workers could produce the same amount of yarn or cloth as a dozen or more workers using the old machines. The introduction of newly invented water- or steam-powered machinery into England's textile industry, starting in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, had a major impact on workers right from the beginning. Various documents attributed to the Luddites ![]()
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