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The Luddites

William Cartwright’s dog started barking soon after midnight on Sunday, April 12, 1812. There was a single gunshot from the north, one from the south, then one each from the east and west. Cartwright’s watchers awoke at the sounds. Men, unseen and uncounted, came through the night and beat the watchers to the ground in the lee of Cartwright’s mill.

Other men broke the mill’s windows and pounded on its door with great sledgehammers called “Enochs”. Yet more fired pistols through the broken windows, and muskets at the higher floors.

Cartwright, accompanied by five employees and five soldiers, counterattacked, firing muskets from behind raised flagstones and ringing a bell to alert the cavalry stationed one mile away.

The mill door, which Cartwright had reinforced and studded with iron, would not yield to the Enochs. Musket balls smoked up and down. Soon, two men lay dying in the yard. After twenty minutes and 140 shots, the attackers retreated, carrying the wounded, unable to retrieve the dying.

Once the shadows of the mob had disappeared, Cartwright looked out. Hammers and pistols had destroyed his first-floor windows, pane and frame; musket balls had shattered fifty more panes upstairs. His door had been sledged beyond repair. Beyond, two mortally wounded men furled and unfurled among discarded hammers and hatchets, axes, puddles of blood, strips of flesh, and a severed finger.

The object of the attack was Cartwright’s automatic loom. The attackers were weavers, trying to destroy the new machine before it destroyed their jobs. They called themselves “Luddites” and had launched similar attacks throughout the north of England. William Cartwright was the first man to ever defeat them.

The Luddites – their name came from the then-famous, possibly fictional machine breaker Ned Ludd – have become icons of both restraint in the face of new technology and entrenched fear of change. They were driven by neither: they were just men desperate to keep their jobs. Their battle was against capital, not technology. The new and improved Enoch sledgehammers they used to wreck looms were named after their inventor, Enoch Taylor, who had also invented the looms that were being wrecked – an irony that was not lost on the Luddites, who chanted, “Enoch did make them, Enoch shall break them.”

The Luddites’ story is a tale not about right and wrong but about the nuance of new. As our creations advance from generation to generation, they have consequences that, good or bad, are nearly always unforeseen and unintended.

New technology is often called “revolutionary”. This is not always hyperbole. The context of that bloody night in England was a collision between two revolutions, one technological and one social.

In the decades before, Europe’s monarchs and aristocrats had been besieged. In 1776, thirteen North American colonies had declared independence from King George III of England. The French Revolution started in 1789, and the French King Louis XVI was dead within four years. Thomas Paine summarized the spirit of revolution, and the age, in 1791, when he wrote in The Rights of Man, “Governments must have arisen either out of the people or over the people.”

At the time of the Luddites, the British government, like the French government that had just been deposed, was one that had arisen over the people. The head of state, King George III, was one strand in a cobweb of intermarried, interrelated monarchs covering Europe. George ruled Britain through a tier of intermediaries: hereditary aristocrats who in turn ruled the general population. Recently, a new layer in the social hierarchy had endangered this arrangement: capitalists – men who became wealthy through working and creating work for others, not by accidents of birth. People claiming to be “royal” did not impress the capitalists, who expected political power along with their profits. Their rise was in part a result of inventions like the printing press, which freed information, and labor-saving machines, which freed time. The middle class is a consequence of the creations of the Middle Ages.

The battle at William Cartwright’s mill exemplified the new tensions. Cartwright, given but a few of the monarch’s soldiers, rang his bell for more, and they never came. The aristocracy was ambivalent about this new industrial class. Many of them recognized the same risk the Luddites saw – that mechanization could concentrate power and wealth in new hands. 

Technology like Taylor’s automatic loom did not threaten one social class. It threatened two. The Luddites, monarchs, and aristocrats did not fear technology in general so much as the possible consequences of particular technologies for them personally. New tools make new societies.

While the aristocrats were unsure of the threat, the Luddites were certain – so convinced that automatic looms would do them harm that they were willing to risk death, either in their raids or from execution after capture, to stop the rise of the machines. But the longer-term consequences of the looms, a precursor to both computers and robots, were unforeseen, especially by the Luddites. They could never have predicted that their descendants – today’s workers – would use information technology and automation to make their living, just as William Cartwright did. In the end, we’ll see, it was the working class that gained most from the new technology. The aristocrats, the only ones who perhaps had the power to keep automation away, did nothing and lost everything.

Excerpt(s) from HOW TO FLY A HORSE: THE SECRET HISTORY OF CREATION, INVENTION, AND DISCOVERY by Kevin Ashton, copyright © 2015 by Kevin Ashton. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.