Supporting all of this work requires hundreds of staff members, who travel each year to Antarctica to cook, clean, repair machinery and even fight fires.
The court suggested that the company's repeated warnings against cleaning with gasoline proved that the company knew that its employees were using gasoline to clean its machinery and that it was dangerous.
And 500 of these were young children, most of them small enough to crawl under the looms and spinning jennies to clean the machinery and gather in stray cotton or wool.
These assistants were often children, and consisted of "piecers" who rejoined broken threads and mule scavengers who cleaned the machinery.
Carbon tetrachloride, now generally banned, was widely used as a solvent to clean metal and machinery, for dry cleaning and spot removers, in refrigeration, as an aerosol propellant and in pesticides.
In contrast, America continues to protect or raise its standard of living with requirements for a minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, safe workplaces and machinery, clean air and water, plant closing notice and unpaid parental leave.
All of those methods have drawbacks: there is the arduous, painful nature of hand weeding; the repetitious and often harmful nature of clean tillage with machinery; the slow, fuel-consuming nature of burning; and the costly requirement of livestock or fowl for the biological grazing methods.
The workers I spoke with told me that their first act when occupying a factory was to clean and secure the machinery, something they did out of pride.
Unlike the decaying towns along the canal, the machinery was clean and freshly painted, and it gave off a distinct steampunk glamour.
Some sculptures receive a follow-up cleaning in which an air shower of walnut shells finely ground into a powder (a technique first devised to clean aircraft and fine machinery) is sprayed onto the bronze surface at 35 pounds pressure per square inch, a process that lifts superficial corrosion products (such as Lennig's powdery white-green) and other chemical residues.
