Brick buildings hovered over a network of canals that cut the land into angular patches. Arranged neatly in clusters, the buildings looked nearly the same, a sea of uniformity broken occasionally by bell towers that marked off one complex from the next. Everything here seemed set in motion… Water was forced into canals by a masonry and wood dam that spanned one thousand feet across the Merrimack River. As the water traveled through this complicated system of canals, it was at times diverted into the basements of the brick mill buildings. Concealed below ground were large wheels with buckets attached to rims; as water filled each bucket, the weight made the wheels turn slowly. The wheels were connected to a system of belts, shafts, and pulleys that dispatched power up several floors and across their ceilings. Belts hanging from the ceiling were linked to machinery that spun cotton yarn and wove cloth from the yarn. The process was simplicity itself: water, gravity, and then power and production.

Twenty-eight mills worked here on several hundred acres of land. Six days a week, the noise of about 150,000 spindles and close to 5,000 looms could be heard across the land. The mills were driven by a massive hydraulic enterprise designed with the single-minded purpose of controlling water for production. The factories employed about eight thousand people—three-fourths of whom were women—and produced roughly 50 million yards of cloth each year.…

1. What aspects of industrialization in Lowell does Steinberg describe here?4
2. What figures does Steinberg present regarding the industrial capacity of the city?