The Slater Mill Historic Site, spread across five-and-a-half acres off Roosevelt Avenue in Pawtucket, brings a visitor back in time – but also points them toward the future. They come each year by the thousands. They go away better educated about the birthplace of American manufacturing.
Some visitors have heard of Slater, but few grasp the depth of his contributions. For far too many, Slater is better known as a former public park and zoo off Newport Avenue in Pawtucket — home to the polar bears before they became chic at Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence.
Rhode Island's Market Has Changed. Developers, Builders, Investors and Sellers Must Change With It.
By Emilio DiSpirito IV License Partner | Engel & Völkers Oceanside Leader | The DiSpirito…
Learn More
But that impression changes quickly, said Jeanne Zavada. Zavada is development coordinator at the Slater Mill Historic Site and she sees the awe on the faces when she conducts a tour at Slater Mill. She sees a sense of understanding begin to set in.
“The degree of innovation and the technology – that is what leaves an impression, no matter the age group,” Zavada said.
Like a classic song, Samuel Slater withstands the test of time.
Slater arrived on the docks of New York in 1789 — fresh from an apprenticeship at the Strutt Spinning Mill in England. Within a year, he had successfully duplicated British water-powered spinning, picking, carding, drawing, and roving machines and initiated the first water-powered cotton textile factory in America.
The factory was not only a success, it marked the birth of manufacturing in America.
Quickly, other mills were to be built – all of them duplicating the architectural style, management procedures and use of women and children as mill operatives. It was known as the “Rhode Island system of manufacture.” Slater’s new innovations sparked the industrialization of textile manufacture.
His accomplishments were unprecedented.
More than 200 years later, Samuel Slater remains a “player” as Rhode Island turns to new technologies and a New Economy. And in fact it is his name that serves as the template for the “Samuel Slater Technology Fund.”
Christopher “Kip” Bergstrom, executive director of Rhode Island Economic Policy Council (EPC), uses Slater as an example of Rhode Island’s technological potential.
GEOGRAPHERS GATHER in Slater Mill for lecture by Bill Del Sesto, center.
“In 1790, we were the Silicon Valley of the United States,” said Bergstrom. “We can get that back.”
Bergstrom’s argument is simple. He is convinced that Rhode Island’s size provides it an advantage – the ability to move quickly and tap into a vast array of resources at colleges and universities, and the Newport Undersea Warfare Center.
And in fact, the EPC sees Slater as a telling example of how history is destined to repeat itself. Slater took advantage of the resources made available to him, and added to them his own innovations and technological foresight. Slater provides an example of what is possible – what is necessary.
Included in a July 1999 EPC Progress Report is the following passage:
“Samuel Slater personifies the power of individual intellect to revolutionize human productivity and reshape economic geography. History teaches us that the challenges of transitioning to a “New Economy” have been overcome before. In 1790, mechanized, water-powered textile mills were the “New Economy.” England had a monopoly on the technology of mechanization, and maintained British economic domination through that knowledge. The infant United States needed to adapt to this “New Economy” and innovate in order to compete… Two hundred years later, the Samuel Slater Technology Fund seeks to strengthen the current Rhode Island job base through the commercialization of technology and to invest in the innovators who will take Rhode Island to the next New Economy.”
It is a notion that has not been lost upon the state’s legislators and other officials.
In 1997, the Rhode Island General Assembly established the Samuel Slater Technology Fund. The idea was to support technology commercialization and industry cluster development. In each of the last two years, the legislature has appropriated $3 million, of which $1 million each year was specifically set aside to fund “Research Centers for Excellence.”
To date, two Research Centers exist. They are the Rhode Island Center for Cellular Medicine in affiliation with Brown University and Lifespan; and the Ocean Technology Center, in affiliation with the University of Rhode Island.
Four more Centers of Excellence are expected to be up and running soon, three before the end of 1999 and the sixth center in 2000.
The planned new centers include: a Center for Biotechnology and a Center for Sensors and Surface Technology at the University of Rhode Island; a Center for Design Research at the Rhode Island School of Design; and a Center for Computer Graphics at Brown University and the Fraunhofer Institute.
Samuel Slater
Samuel Slater, no doubt, would be proud. His name lives on – and with it so does the possibility that this generation will connect him not with polar bears, but enormous technological innovation and opportunity.
“I think people have to come here and see for themselves – to see that Samuel Slater was not just someone we read about in a textbook,” said Zavada. “After taking the tour, people make the connection and actually understand.”
(November has been designated as “Samuel Slater Technology Month” in Rhode Island.)
