Read more here: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sd ... story.htmlNEW YORK — For every clever man who invents a labor-saving machine, it seems a crowd of angry men rises up to destroy it.
The most famous of the machine haters were the Luddites, the skilled weavers of England who, in 1811, began smashing power looms that were threatening to take their jobs. Their name became a byword for technophobes ever after, but they were neither the first nor the most violent.
Consider the fate of the poor Pole who, in 1579, came up with a mechanical device for weaving ribbon. Legend has it that city officials in his native Danzig were so convinced it would steal work from hand weavers, they broke the machine to bits, then drowned him.
A century and a half later, in 1733, the Englishman James Kay built a machine that allowed workers to weave textiles faster by means of a “flying shuttle” containing yarn. His reward? Exile to Paris, courtesy of angry workers who thought his machine was a job killer.
In 1770, James Hargreaves invented a “spinning jenny” to speed the process of twisting threads together to make yarn. Workers broke into his house and destroyed his machine.
It helps to have a dictator on your side. In 1801, the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a device that allowed weavers to create patterns in fabric with different colored yarns without the help of a second set of hands. Napoleon had to dispatch gendarmes to protect him from angry workers, according to Joel Mokyr, a historian at Northwestern University.
In 1830, English farm workers threatened by automatic threshers figured they could get landowners who owned the machines to do the smashing for them. They sent letters threatening violence unless the landowners raised their wages and destroyed the threshers themselves.
It didn’t work. The ensuing Captain Swing Riots spread terror across the countryside as workers burned piles of hay and broke machines.
In the United States, protest has often taken forms other than violence.
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