History is littered with stories of young children going out to work, sometimes in shocking and cruel conditions. One of the most dangerous jobs they could have was the work of a scavenger, in the cotton mills of the 18th and 19th centuries. Cotton was such a valuable commodity in those days the American south had declared that cotton is king that even discarded scraps of it were sought after. Consequently, mills would employ children sometimes younger than ten - as scavengers, tasked with dashing under the spinning mules to retrieve discarded bits of cotton. The people who operated the mules would not stop while the children were underneath they were paid based on how much they produced so injuries were common. Fingers could be lost, children got crushed, and sometimes scalped by the moving machinery. On some occasions, children even died, and at a mill near Cork in Ireland, there were at least six deaths in one four-year period. Various pieces of legislation tried to curb this child employment, but it was not until the Education Act of 1918 that anyone under 14 was officially banned from working in factories.
