The working craftsman was tied to the technical and scientific knowledge of his time in the daily practice of his craft. Apprenticeship commonly included training in mathematics, including algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, in the properties and provenance of the materials common to the craft, in the physical sciences, and in mechanical drawing. Well-administered apprenticeships provided subscriptions to the trade and technical journals affecting the craft so that apprentices could follow developments.\* But more important than formal or informal training was the fact that the craft provided a daily link between science and work, since the craftsman was constantly called upon to use rudimentary scientific knowledge, mathematics, drawing, etc., in his practice.\*\* Such craftsmen were an important part of the scientific public of their time, and as a rule exhibited an interest in science and culture beyond that connected directly to their work. The flourishing Mechanics Institutes of the mid-nineteenth century, which in Britain numbered some 1,200 and had a membership of over 200,000, were in large measure devoted to satisfying this interest through lectures and libraries.1⁵ The Royal Institution, which existed in England to further the progress of science and its application to industry, was forced, when it became a fashionable place to visit and wished to preserve its exclusivity, to brick up its back door to keep out the mechanics who stole into the gallery.16 Samuel Gompers, as a cigarmaker living in New York's dense working-class district on the Lower East Side in the 1860s, saw and experienced this same working-class interest:
Cooper Union provided opportunities for formal study courses as well as lectures every Saturday evening which were usually attended by from twentyfive hundred to three thousand. Nothing humanly possible ever kept me from attending those Saturday night lectures. I was fairly quivering in my intense desire to know. Mental hunger is just as painful as physical hunger. Every Saturday night some great scholar talked to an open meeting and gave most wonderfully illuminating results of experimentation and study. Sometimes Professor Proctor told us of the wonders of astronomyof what science had learned of time and distance, light, motion, etc. Truths gleaned in these lectures became a most vital part of me and gave the world marvelously inspiring meaning. Those lectures were treasured opportunities to hear authorities in science tell what they were doing and thinking. I attended these lectures and study classes over a period of twenty years.17
We may marvel still at the British silk weavers of Spitalfields, whom Mayhew found, in the middle of the nineteenth century, living in incredible poverty and degradation, and who, but a short time before, when the day of the skilled hand-loom weaver was not yet over, had made their district of London a center of science and culture:
The weavers were, formerly, almost the only botanists in the metropolis, and their love of flowers to this day is a strongly marked characteristic of the class. Some years back, we are told, they passed their leisure hours, and generally the whole family dined on Sundays, at the little gardens in the environs of London, now mostly built upon. Not very long ago there was an Entomological Society, and they were among the most diligent entomologists, in the kingdom. This taste, though far less general than formerly, still continues to be a type of the class. There was at one time a Floricultural Society, an Historical Society, and a Mathematical Society, all maintained by the operative silk-weavers; and the celebrated Dollond, the inventor of the achromatic telescope, was a weaver; so too were Simpson and Edwards, the mathematicians, before they were taken from the loom into the employ of Government, to teach mathematics to the cadets at Woolwich and Chatham.18
The same remarkable history characterized the weavers of Yorkshire and Lancashire, as E. P. Thompson notes: “Every weaving district had its weaverpoets, biologists, mathematicians, musicians, geologists, botanists. . . . There are northern museums and natural history societies which still possess records or collections of lepidoptera built up by weavers; while there are accounts of weavers in isolated villages who taught themselves geometry by chalking on their flagstones, and who were eager to discuss the differential calculus. ",19
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
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\* The effects of the decline of apprenticeship were felt as long ago as the time of the Hoxie report, which says: "It is evident, however, that the native efficiency of the working class must suffer from the neglect of apprenticeship, if no other means of industrial education is forthcoming. Scientific managers, themselves, have complained bitterly of the poor and lawless material from which they must recruit their workers, compared with the efficient and self-respecting craftsmen who applied for employment twenty years ago."13 These same scientific managers have not ceased to complain bitterly, as is their wont, of the characteristics of a working population which they themselves have shaped to suit their ends, but they have not yet found a way to produce workers who are at one and the same time degraded in their place in the labor process, and also conscientious and proud of their work.
\*\* In a discussion of the craftsmen of the Industrial Revolution, David Landes writes: “Even more striking is the theoretical knowledge of these men. They were not, on the whole, the unlettered tinkerers of historical mythology. Even the ordinary millwright, as Fairbairn notes, was usually a fair arithmetician, knew something of geometry, levelling, and mensuration, and in some cases possessed a very competent knowledge of practical mathematics. He could calculate the velocities, strength, and power of machines: could draw in plan and section. . . .’ Much of these ‘superior attainments and intellectual power’ reflected the abundant facilities for technical education in ‘villages’ like Manchester during this period, ranging from Dissenters academies and learned societies to local and visiting lecturers, ‘mathematical and commercial’ private schools with evening classes, and a wide circulation of practical ,,14 manuals, periodicals, and encyclopaedias.