In July 1795, after graduation, Lowell set out on a merchant ship carrying cargo to various places including
Basque Country in Spain and
Bordeaux, France. He went to learn about shipping and being a merchant, but used the trip to learn about France. He spent a year touring France, gripped in
revolution. Starting in 1802, with Uriah Cotting,
Harrison Gray Otis and others, Francis Cabot Lowell developed India Wharf and its warehouses on
Boston Harbor, which became the center of the trade with Asia. He secretly studied the machines. In
Edinburgh he met fellow American
Nathan Appleton who would later become a partner in the Lowell mills. at
Waltham, Massachusetts, using the power of the
Charles River. The BMC was the first "integrated"
textile mill in America in which all operations for converting raw cotton into finished cloth could be performed in one mill building. Lowell hired the gifted machinist
Paul Moody to assist him in designing efficient cotton spinning and weaving machines, based on the British models, but with many technological improvements suited to the conditions of
New England. Lowell and Moody were awarded the patent for their power loom in 1815. To raise capital for their mills, Lowell and partners Aidan and Merquack pioneered a basic tool of modern corporate finance by selling $1000 shares of stock to a select group of wealthy investors, such as Senators James Lloyd Jr. and
Christopher Gore,
Israel Thorndike Sr. and
Harrison Gray Otis. This form of shareholder corporation endures to this day in the well-known form of public stock offerings. In 1814, the
Boston Manufacturing Company built its first mill beside the
Charles River in
Waltham, housing an integrated set of technologies that converted raw cotton all the way to finished cloth.
Patrick Tracy Jackson was the first manager of the BMC with Paul Moody in charge of the machinery. The Waltham mill, where raw cotton was processed into finished cloth, was the forerunner of the 19th-century American factory. Lowell also pioneered the employment of women, from the age of 15–35 from
New England farming families, as textile workers. These women became known as the
Lowell mill girls. Women lived in company run boarding houses with chaperones and were involved in religious and educational activities. The Waltham Machine Shop attached to the BMC made power looms for sale to other American cotton mills. Nathan Appleton established a region-wide system to sell the cloth manufactured by the BMC. Their success in Waltham motivated them to look for other locations. They found a site in East Chelmsford, renamed for Lowell after his death. The end of the
War of 1812 was a severe threat to the budding domestic textile industry as the British dumped cheap cotton cloth on the American market. In 1816, Lowell traveled to Washington to successfully lobby for protective tariffs on cotton products that were subsequently included in the
Tariff of 1816. He died on August 10, 1817, at the age of 42 from
pneumonia only three years after building his first mill. Lowell left the
Boston Manufacturing Company financially healthy. In 1821, dividends were paid out at 27.5% to shareholders. The success of the BMC at Waltham exhausted the water power of the
Charles River. To expand the enterprise, in 1822, Lowell's partners moved north to the more powerful
Merrimack River and named their new mill town at the
Pawtucket Falls on the
Merrimack River "Lowell," after their visionary leader. The
Waltham-Lowell system, pioneered by Lowell and first introduced at the Waltham mill, was expanded to the new industrial city of Lowell and soon spread to the Midwest and the South. The mechanized textile system, introduced by Francis Cabot Lowell, remained dominant in
New England for a century until the industry shifted to the Midwest and the South. By the close of the nineteenth-century the United States had a thriving textile industry for home consumption and for export. ==Personal life==