September 18, Greenfield Village -- crafts

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As I understand it, Henry Ford was interested in all sorts of technology. During his lifetime he collected examples of many, many different kinds of machines. He also collected the actual working places of people like Edison and the Wright brothers.

Now, when you visit Greenfield Village, you can see the places where significant inventors really worked, and enjoy a vast array of past technologies, most (all?) of which are in actual use.

These pots were not made here, but were (I believe) made in the USA. I think they are the biggest I've ever seen................... (Those individuals in pink are children, not adults, but I think just about any adult would fit handily in one of these pots.......)





The next image is part of a Jacquard loom. Jacquard looms were controlled by the first punch cards. They were very significant forebears to 20th century computers.

Weaving generally has two equally important sets of threads. The loom is threaded with warp threads before weaving can begin. Warp threads are parallel to each other.

In order to weave (remember the over/under/over/under weaving you did with paper strips in elementary school?), the weft threads are woven over/under/over/under the warp threads. Weft threads are parallel to each other, and perpendicular to the warp threads.

Looms make this process a LOT faster by providing a way to lift groups of threads all at once. Simple mechanical looms may lift half of the warp (every other thread, or every two threads, or...), which allows the weaver to put a weft thread under the lifted threads, then lower those warp threads and lift the other half of the warp threads, then put the weft thread under the newly-lifted warp threads (repeat, repeat, repeat.....).

More complicated looms allow the lifting of more different groups of warp threads.

Jacquard looms allow each individual warp thread to be lifted individually.

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The holes in the punched cards determine whether or not each warp thread is lifted, allowing for the very complex weaving you see in the sample on the loom.

As you might guess, it takes a huge amount of time to get any loom set up for weaving, and for Jacquard looms, the time and energy is very significant.

Once it's set up, though, very fancy (double-sided/reversible!) weaving is vastly easier than it would be otherwise.

This is really some excellent and amazing technology............

All the threads going up are the ones that lift the warp threads (which are white on this loom at present -- the weft is blue). The punched cards are just outside this image on the left and are laced together one after the other so they form loop of cards. The amazing part takes place up above, where long (15"?) skinny pins are either pushed by each card (or not, if there's a hole where a pin is). Some lifters are pushed aside by their pins, and their threads are not lifted............

The docent told us that there are exactly three working Jacquard looms in North America. A wife/husband team restored this one to working order in the recent past.

Very cool. I was glad we were there when there wasn't a big crowd, so we could ask questions which had more complicated answers than most people probably want to hear!





This water wheel powers a working grain mill (which was not running when we walked through).





Duck.





There is a large glass-blowing studio, where functional glass pieces are blown.

Glass-blowing on this scale takes teamwork of an advanced and practiced sort.

Different people take different roles, keeping the glass heated (between 1600 and 2100 degrees F, if I remember correctly), keeping it spinning (so it doesn't just drip down to the ground), shaping it, blowing into a glass bubble so it expands, cutting it, etc, etc, etc.

We watched this bowl being made. They are almost ready to put it into an annealing oven (to keep today's work hot all day, and then very slowly cool it off overnight, as the glass is likely to crack if it cools too quickly). They are smoothing the bottom with the torch, and then will put the bowl in the oven.





Here they begin the next bowl. They have gathered a glob of molten glass on the end of a blowpipe, and are cooling the pipe to a temperature their hands can tolerate.....



At the end of the visit, I'll show you glass for sale in the shop, and you'll get a better look at a couple of examples of these bowls.

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