Mechanics' institute
The mechanics' institutes often included libraries for the adult working class, and were said to provide them with an alternative pastime to gambling and drinking in pubs.
[1] Its purpose was to "address societal needs by incorporating fundamental scientific thinking and research into engineering solutions".
It was as a result of delivering a lecture series at the Cheltenham Mechanics' Institute that the radical George Holyoake was arrested and then convicted on a charge of blasphemy.
[3] Beyond a lending library, mechanics' institutes also provided lecture courses, laboratories, and in some cases contained a museum for the members' entertainment and education.
The London Mechanics' Institute installed gas illumination by 1825, revealing the demand and need for members to use the books.
[14] G. Jefferson explains: The first phase, the Mechanics Institute movement, grew in an atmosphere of interest by a greater proportion of the population in scientific matters revealed in the public lectures of famous scientists such as Faraday.
More precisely, as a consequence of the introduction of machinery a class workmen emerged to build, maintain and repair, the machines on which the blessing of progress depended, at a time when population shifts and the dissolving influences of industrialization in the new urban areas, where these were concentrated, destroyed the inadequate old apprentice system and threw into relief the connection between material advancement and the necessity of education to take part in its advantages.
[16] As of 2021, there have been five such conferences:[17] Thousands of mechanics' institutes buildings still operate throughout the world, mostly now used as libraries, parts of universities, adult education facilities, and a few still use their original names and function as a society or other type of organisation.
The provision of reading rooms, museums, lectures and classes were still important, but the Australian schools were also more likely to include a social programme in their calendar of events.
[30] In the following decades, almost every town in Victoria had a mechanics' institute, usually including a hall, library and reading rooms, games facilities, and both educational programs and entertainment.
[31] (alphabetical order by town or city) In addition, each state and territory in the US has at least one land grant university that includes a college of agriculture and a college of engineering, as provided for by the Morrill Land-Grant Acts to teach agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanic arts as well as classical studies.
