[...] Samuel Gompers, as a cigarmaker living in New York’s dense working-class district on the Lower East Side in the 1860s, saw and experienced this same working-class interest:

Cooper Union provided opportunities for formal study courses as well as lectures every Saturday evening which were usually attended by from twenty-five hundred to three thousand. Nothing humanly possible ever kept me from attending those Saturday night lectures. I was fairly quivering in my intense desire to know. Mental hunger is just as painful as physical hunger. Every Saturday night some great scholar talked to an open meeting and gave most wonderfully illuminating results of experimentation and study. Sometimes Professor Proctor told us of the wonders of astronomy—of what science had learned of time and distance, light, motion, etc. Truths gleaned in these lectures became a most vital part of me and gave the world marvelously inspiring meaning. Those lectures were treasured opportunities to hear authorities in science tell what they were doing and thinking. I attended these lectures and study classes over a period of twenty years.17