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Comment by plufz | Hacker News Reader

You don’t have to be a scholar in gender studies to wonder why textile has been a bit overlooked when looking back at human development.

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By who? The cotton gin and spinning jenny are front and center in any history of the early industrial revolution.

The development of dyes was the genesis of the chemical industry, but no one really talks about that.

I googled "history of the chemical industry" and synthetic dyes were mentioned prominently by each of the first five results returned.

But have you heard anyone _talk_ about it? It's common knowledge that the industrial revolution was mills and steam engines and mechanization. In my experience almost no one knows about the other piece of the textile industry that drove industrialization.

It's not hidden, but I don't think it's commonly known.

It's just the A in BASF.

But yeah, that entire IG Farben episode might have toned down their enthusiasm for identifying with dyes a little. Same for their peers up and down the Rhine.

That a technology to develop the spinning wheel should have been around a lot sooner, but it seems to have not appeared until relatively late in the history. Now yes, we are talking probably a thousand years before, but the idea is simple enough that you would think that the ancients who knew all the different pieces such as the lathe could have made that work.

Spinning Jenny? Yeah, that's complex enough that it couldn't have appeared much sooner. I'm not sure if the cotton gin would have been possible sooner or not.

If you want to dive deeper, this looks at exactly that question:

https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/out-of-whole-cloth

I didn’t mean industrialization but more articles like this one https://www.gu.se/en/news/textile-production-a-driving-force...

You don't have to be a materials science Ph.D to know that stone and metal last a bit longer than cloth.

The irony of the comment you're making is that you are the one drawing from a gender stereotype that is ambiguous with respect to its immutability across time and culture

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