Reclaiming a Manufacturing Heritage Where It All Began

Only a few miles from where the American Industrial Revolution was unleashed, a group of artists, designers, educators, manufacturers, and policymakers gathered for three days to rekindle a flame that once burned brightly in Rhode Island, the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution.

Why Rhode Island? In the years following the American Revolution, technology in the United States didn't stand still. But while we made advancements in manufacturing technology, we were not competing at the scale that English mills enjoyed.

It took a rogue apprentice, Samuel Slater, to turn the tables. Slater had to defy English immigration laws against exporting industrial knowledge to do so (yes, they knew they had an edge and wanted to keep it). He left England in 1789 and headed to New York, hoping to commercialize his knowledge. His idea didn't take hold there, but it wouldn't be long before he found the right place.

Rhode Island's Moses Brown came from a family that had prospered from the slave trade [PDF link]. Rhode Island was a prosperous corner of one of the triangular trade configurations in which slaves, raw materials, and finished good flowed between West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America.

Moses Brown was an abolitionist, and he wanted out of the family business. In a break with his family, Moses Brown turned to textile manufacturing. Brown would advocate for anti-slavery legislation within Rhode Island. Eventually, his brother John Brown would become the first person prosecuted under a federal law prohibiting US ships from trafficking in slaves.

Brown's mill was based around the same mill design that Slater had mastered in England. News of this reached Slater, who realized that Brown needed his skills to be successful. In 1790, they agreed to work together, and their first mill opened in 1793. To this day, the Slater Mill Historic Site is recognized as the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. It's fitting that one of Rhode Island's most vital makerspaces, Ocean State Maker Mill, is a mere half mile from Slater Mill.

Rhode Island would continue to contribute to manufacturing advances. George Henry Corliss of Providence contributed significant improvements to the design of steam engines, greatly increasing efficiency and scale. Corliss' designs date back to the mid-1800s, and they continued manufacture well into the 1900s. The engine most people are familiar with is the Corliss Centennial Engine (pictured at the top of this article), which powered the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. It stood in the center of Machinery Hall, and powered all the machinery in the building and some beyond it. The expo was open for six months; during that time, ten million visitors passed through it.

If you want to see a Corliss engine up close, make sure you attend the New England Wireless and Steam Museum's annual Yankee Steam-Up. You'll find the engine in the Merriam Steam Building.

It was with the stories of Slater and Corliss that I helped kick off Rhode Island's recent Manufacturing + Maker Tech Summit. On a Sunday morning in March, I joined two friends from AS220 to provide the opening talk. AS220, among many other things, is a three-building art center that provides unjuried and uncensored exhibit and performance space, live/work studios for artists, and is home to the Providence Fab Lab, a print shop, darkroom, dance studio, theater, and youth arts program. It also is home to Modern Device, an open source hardware manufacturer that specializes in sensors, wireless modules, and an assortment of Arduino and Raspberry Pi accessories.

This three-day conference brought together makers, manufacturers, and educators from the state where so much of American manufacturing history began. The convener, the IYRS School of Technology and Trades, availed themselves of the smart people who attended: they harnessed the power of attendees through a series of design charrettes to plan their upcoming Mobile Maker Lab. Throughout the event, IYRS and conform lab (who is helping IYRS with the lab), tapped into the wisdom of RI's maker and manufacturer community to cook up a plan that will make the lab a reality in a few months.

Our modern manufacturing future isn't a revival of factories or assembly lines. It's a smart, tactical embrace of advanced manufacturing, from subtractive to additive. It's about finding the sweet spot of speed and efficiency in the path from design to manufacture.

Earlier this year, I joined LinkedIn Learning as the Content Manager for Product Design and Manufacturing (LinkedIn Learning is an online learning platform that combines industry-leading content from Lynda.com with highly-personalized course recommendations from LinkedIn’s professional network of more than 500 million members.)

One of the things I love about this role is that I can engage in my passion for these fields with both my day job and my involvement with community organizations and policymakers. For example, as a result of my involvement with the summit, and an evening I spent at Polaris MEP's Rhode Island Manufacturing B2B event, I've met a fair number of potential instructors who I hope you'll see in a course soon. Several folks I met through these events are Rhino geeks. And Rhode Island has more machine shops than it should be possible to fit within our borders, so I'm hoping to fit some Rhode Islanders into our roster of manufacturing instructors.

I am feeling something that is often rare in Rhode Island: a sense of optimism that artists, designers, makers, educators, and politicians might be able to make a difference together, and just possibly, reclaim Rhode Island's place in the history of manufacturing.

It's not easy, and Rhode Islanders have decades of disappointment and struggle behind them. There are many reasons to pessimistic about our state's economic future. That's the state of mind I grew up with, but I eventually became optimistic right around the time I started organizing geeks and makers in Rhode Island.

But even still, I can't ignore facts. In my first week at LinkedIn, we released our February 2017 Workforce Report. I remember excitedly opening it and wondering if I'd see Rhode Island in there. Well, I did, and it wasn't great. Not only was Providence in the top 10 metro areas with the most LinkedIn member migration (people moving in and out), but we were #1 in another measure: over the 12-month period the Workforce Report analyzed, the Providence metro area lost the most workers in the US.

But you know, rather than give up, I've used this report to motivate myself (and others!). I know what I'm going to do to brighten my corner of this state. In just a few weeks, the Rhode Island Mini Maker Faire is returning to Providence. I've been co-producing this event with a variety of collaborators, beginning with co-founder Kipp Bradford back in 2009.

This year, I'm working with AS220 and the City of Providence to make the event free, family-friendly, and open to the public. And even if our state gets some bad economic news that week, I'm going to do my best to keep everyone's spirits up!