Sarah O’Connor has written an insightful and very relevant article praising the British “techies” who made companies more productive (Opinion, August 8) during the Industrial Revolution. “One key factor”, she writes, “was the quality and skill of the country’s workers”.
This was due in no small part to the rise of mechanics institutes in Britain in the 1820s — a consequence of the introduction of machinery and the emergence of a class of workers to build, maintain and repair them. By the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, there were over 700 such educational establishments.
The prototype was the Andersonian Institute in Glasgow, established in 1796 as a bequest by John Anderson, with no less than 1,000 workers attending in its first year.
The institutes were often funded by local businessmen. For example, the industrialist Sir William Armstrong contributed to the Elswick Mechanics Institute on Tyneside. They were also the forerunners of today’s technical universities. In fact, when William Barton Rogers founded MIT in Boston in 1861, his role model was Warrington Academy in Cheshire. One major outcome of this technical education movement was the creation of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers in London in 1846 that raised the level and status of “techies” to that of a full technological profession.
Neil McPhater
Cambridge, UK