by Vaclav Smil
These are indefensible views as the reality was much more nuanced. No historical study can convey it better than did Zola’s monumental Rougon-Macquart cycle, perhaps the unsurpassed witness of the post-1860 era, with its astonishing sweep of desperation and hope, poverty and riches, suffering and triumphs, in milieus both rural and urban and in settings ranging from an almost unimaginably brutal world of vengeful peasantry to the intrigues of Parisian nouveaux riches. The supposed rural harmonies hid a great deal of poverty, misery, and autocratic abuse, and many pre-industrial landscapes were neither untouched nor well cared for. And for every demonstration of undeniably reprehensible urban reality—unemployment, exploitation, low wages, unsanitary living conditions, noise, air and water pollution, illiteracy, lack of security—there are countervailing examples (Hopkins 2000).
Most significantly, millions of new jobs that paid far better than any work that could be obtained in the countryside were created by risk-taking entrepreneurs. Some of them were industrialists with exemplary social conscience. Robert Bosch instituted an eight-hour working day in 1906, four years later made Saturday afternoon free, and transferred most of the company’s profits to charities (Bosch GmbH 2003). This charitable pattern endures: the company is 92% owned by Robert Bosch Foundation, which funds many social, artistic, and scientific activities. And while the overall social progress was not as rapid as many would have liked, it was undeniable.
Besides gradual introduction of shorter work hours and higher purchasing power, the two pre-WWI generations also saw diffusion of compulsory grade school attendance and the beginning of pension and health insurance schemes in many countries (first in Bismarck’s Germany in the early 1880s, followed soon by Austria). For all of these reasons, Ginzberg (1982:69) rightly observed that Karl Marx “was better as a critic than as a prophet” as he did not anticipate the substantial gains in the quality of life that would eventually result from mechanization and increased productivity.
Statistical bottom lines speak for themselves: in no previous period of Western history did so many people become adequately fed (e.g., British intake of high-quality animal protein roughly doubled), basically educated (as grade school attendance became compulsory: in the United Kingdom up to age 10 in 1880, up to 12 by 1899), and able to enjoy the modicum of material affluence (more than one set of clothes and bedding, more pieces of furniture) than they did during the two pre-WWI generations. But, above all, they benefited from unprecedented declines in infant mortality, which was the main reason for rising life expectancy. Between the 1860s and 1914, Western infant mortality was roughly halved to just more than 100/1,000 newborns while life expectancy at birth increased by 20-25% to around 50 years, with the British means going from 40 years during the late 1860s to 53 years by 1913 (Steckel and Floud 1997).
Recent laments about negative consequences of globalization often sound as if the process of economic interdependence was the invention of the closing decades of the 20th century. In reality, parts of Europe participated in relatively intensive long-range trade already during the early modern era that preceded industrialization. This process widened and intensified during the latter half of the 19th century, and the trend toward economic globalization was firmly in place by the beginning of the 20th century, only to be derailed and slowed down until the 1950s, when it resumed at a much accelerated pace.
Both the epochal transition from biomass to fossil fuels and the diffusion of mechanization and mass production led inevitably to greater dependence on nonlocal resources. Coal deposits can be found in scores of countries around the world, but many coal basins contain seams of rather inferior quality, and so excellent steam and metallurgical coals became an early item of international trade. Major oil and gas fields are much less equitably distributed, and hence the universal transition from coals to hydrocarbons had to be accompanied by rising shipments of oil and, once technical progress made that possible, also by large-scale trade in natural gas. Ores, needed in increasing quantities by rapidly expanding iron and steel industry and nonferrous metallurgy, are even more unevenly distributed; for example, only three countries (Australia, Guinea, and Brazil) produce 60% of the world’s bauxite (Plunkert 2002).
Virtually every country, aside from a few city states, could produce all (nearly all) food to assure adequate nutrition for its population, but this autarky would be very expensive, and in most cases it would result in a limited choice of foodstuffs. More affluent societies with larger disposable incomes thus naturally create markets for a greater variety of food, and this demand is best satisfied by specialized producers who have comparative advantage thanks to the climate, long experience in particular cultivation, or low labor costs. Consequently, international trade in foodstuffs began expanding beyond the shipments of low-volume and luxury items during the 1870s as soon as longdistance transportation of bulky commodities (grains, refrigerated meat from North America, Australia, and Argentina) could rely on large-capacity iron-hull ships.
Between 1870 and 1913, the share of exports in the total economic product rose by 50% (to about 12%) in 10 of the most industrialized countries, and by 1913 more than 25% of the United Kingdom’s, Australia’s, and Canada’s gross national products originated from exports, and the shares were about 20% for Germany and Italy (Maddison 1995). This means that some countries were relatively nearly as dependent on exports in 1900 as they were in 2000. The period also saw the rise of a new kind of enterprise, multinational corporations that made their products in a number of countries rather than just exporting from one location. Robert Bosch was one of the first producers with a clear global aspiration: by 1913 his operations extended to 20 countries, and, still uncharacteristic for that time, his company derived more than 80% of its revenues from sales outside Germany. Several companies that were established before WWI and that eventually expanded into the world’s leading multinationals have been mentioned in this book: General Electric, Brown Boveri, General Motors, Ford, Siemens, Marconi—and also the two top cola makers, Coca and Pepsi.
Remarkably, only two of today’s 10 largest multinationals (when ranked by their revenues in the year 2000) were not set up before 1914: Walmart Stores (no. 2) and Toyota Motor Corporation (no. 10). First-ranked Exxon-Mobil comes from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust that was organized in 1882 and dissolved by the Congress in 1911. Origins of the third, fourth, and fifth largest companies, all of them automakers (GM, Ford, and Daimler Chrysler), have already been described. Royal Dutch/Shell (no. 6) resulted from a 1907 merger of two young companies (Shell 1892, Royal Dutch 1903), while BP (no. 7) was set up in 1901 by William Knox D’Arcy in order to explore oil concession in Persia. GE, whose origins go back to Edison’s first electric company of 1878, ranked eighth worldwide in 2000, and Mitsubishi, set up as Tsukomo Shokai by Yataro Iwasaki in 1870 (Mitsubishi 2003), was ninth.
More than a century later, all of these companies continue to be at the forefront of globalization, and the interdependence generated by this now so pervasive business pattern creates many positive feedbacks as well as many regrettable trends. Principal manifestations of the process will be examined in some detail in the companion volume. There is only one more matter I want to address here—in chapter 7 I return, briefly, to those remarkable pre-WWI years in order to convey some of the perceptions, feelings, hopes, and fears of those who lived in those momentous times and reflected on the accomplishments, promise, and perils of technical advances that were creating a new civilization.
7
Contemporary Perceptions
It has been a gigantic tidal wave of human ingenuity and resource so stupendous in its magnitude, so complex in its diversity, so profound in its thought, so fruitful in its wealth, so beneficent in its results, that the mind is strained and embarrassed in its effort to expand to a full appreciation of it.
Edward W. Byrn, Scientific American (1896)
This book pays homage to the astonishing concatenation of epochal innovations that were introduced and improve
d during the two pre-WWI generations and whose universal adoption created the civilization of the 20th century. I have marshaled a great deal of evidence to justify this—in retrospect so inevitable—judgment. But I do not want to leave this fascinating subject without asking, and attempting to answer, one last obvious question: to what extent were the people who lived at that time aware that they were present at the creation of a new era? This question must have a complex answer that spans the entire range of responses from “not at all” through “in some ways” to “very much so.” Reasons for this are obvious.
Short as it was in relative terms, the span of two generations is too long a period to be dominated by any consistent perception. Those two generations
FRONTISPIECE 7. By 1914 this kind of an early-morning commuting scene—female office workers, shop assistants and dressmakers are shown here arriving at a Paris terminus—was common in all large Western cities. Reproduced from The Illustrated London News, April 11, 1914.
saw both the pronounced ups and downs of economic fortunes and some notable social and political upheavals (many quite unrelated to technical advances) that greatly influenced the public mood. And even in the countries at the forefront of technical advances, the chores and challenges of everyday existence claimed inevitably much more attention than matters that, at least initially, appeared to have little bearing on everyday life. The earliest stages of building a new civilization were inevitably shaped more by many attributes of the preceding era that coexisted for many decades with some thoroughly modern practices.
Coexistence of old and new, of improvements eagerly anticipated and welcomed and widely distrusted or ridiculed, was thus entirely natural. The enormity of the post-1860s saltation was such that people alive in 1913 were further away from the world of their great-grandparents who lived in 1813 than those were from their ancestors in 1513. At the same time, everyday experiences of the two pre-WWI generations had inevitably much in common with the pre-industrial norms: horses were still the most important prime movers in Western agriculture and in urban traffic, cars looked like, and were initially called, horseless carriages, and as they rushed out to see their first airplane in a summer sky many village children still ran barefoot, saving their shoes for fall and winter. Many epochal inventions appeared to be just fascinating curiosities, legerdemains of scientists and engineers with little practical importance for poor families.
Some innovations had rapidly conquered many old markets or created entirely new ones. Others had to undergo relatively prolonged maturation periods as their convenience, cost, and flexibility were not immediately obvious compared to long-established devices and practices. Among the many examples in this category are Otto’s early gas engine (during the early 1870s nobody foresaw that their gasoline-fueled successors will eventually energize millions of vehicles) and the first automobiles of the late 1880s (there was nothing to indicate that those expensive and unreliable toys bought by a few rich adventurers will mutate in just two decades into the paragon of mass ownership). And, finally, the novelty of some developments was so much outside the normal frames of references that those ideas were not perceived as epochal but rather simply as mad.
This was the case, most prominently, with the first airplanes. When in 1906 Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe, the publisher of Daily Mail) offered £1,000 for the first pilot to cross the English Channel, Punch immediately ridiculed the challenge:
Deeply impressed as always with the conviction that the progress of invention has been delayed by lack of encouragement, Mr. Punch has decided to offer… £10,000 to… the first aeronaut who succeeds in flying to Mars and back within a week. (Anonymous 1906:380)
FIGURE 7.1. Blériot’s 1909 monoplane in flight and a head-on view of its propeller and three-cylinder engine. Library of Congress images (LC-USZ62-94564 and LC-USZ62-107356).
But the Channel prize was won by Bléeriot just four years later (figure 7.1) and in 1913 Lord Northcliffe offered £10,000 for the first crossing of the Atlantic—this time with no parodies from Punch. The new challenge was taken up in early 1914 by Rodman Wanamaker, who commissioned Glenn Curtiss to build a flying boat powered by a 150-kW engine that would be capable of making that trip in a single flight of 12-15 hours, but the plan had to be shelved because of WWI.
If the public was confused and unsure, so were many innovators. As we have also already seen, some of them were surprisingly diffident and dismissive regarding the worth and eventual impact of their efforts. But other creators of the Age of Synergy were mindful of their place in creating a new world. As they looked back, they were proud of their accomplishments, and many of them had no doubt that even greater changes were ahead, that the worth of their inventions was more in the promise of what they would do rather than in what they had already done. Still, I suspect that most of them would be surprised to see how the great technical transformations of the 20th century left so many of their great innovations fundamentally intact.
And these feelings of confident expectations were not limited to creative and decision-making elites. The frontispiece of this closing chapter exudes the confident demeanor of young chic Parisian ladies as they spill from a railway terminal to the city streets in the spring of 1914 on their way to jobs as typists, telephonists, and shop assistants. The image captures what was for them already an everyday routine but what would have been an unthinkable display of independence and opportunity in 1864. Although they were still only modestly paid, they were breaking a key feature of the traditional social order. They must have known that they are living in an era that was unlike anything else in the past, and they expected further great changes.
This shift in female work was one of the signal achievements of the age. Several trends combined to make it possible: modern plumbing, heating, and electric appliances eased the household chores and were doing away with domestic servants, while at the same time telephones, typewriters, calculators, and keypunches were opening up new opportunities for female employment, and electric trains and subways were making it possible to commute to downtowns where the new office jobs were concentrated. During the 1860s, most of the working women were employed as household servants, and in the United Kingdom that share was still as high as 85% by 1891 (Samuelson 1896). By 1914 household servants were a rapidly shrinking minority of female labor force everywhere in the Western world as a new class of increasingly independent wage-earning females was expanding and creating, very visibly, a new social and economic reality.
Although in an expected minority, many astute observers were aware of the epoch-making nature of new inventions as they correctly foresaw their long-term impact. They were able to see the advantages of new ways quite clearly even decades before their general acceptance. For example, Rose (1913:115), writing about the rapid diffusion of agricultural tractors (a process that was not completed even in the United States until the early 1960s), felt that
there is no question but we have entered upon a new era in agriculture. The farmer desires the comforts and advantages of the city dweller, and these he gets easily and cheaply with the small gasoline engine… It multiplies his capacity and gives him either more leisure or enables him to farm a larger area and increases his income. Power farming has just begun, and the start is encouraging.
Some innovations were so indisputably revolutionary that even uninitiated public was made almost instantly aware of their importance years before it had any chance to buy or to use these gadgets or machines or to benefit from the new processes. Although rather primitive even in comparison with designs that followed just a few years later, Bell’s first telephones were greeted almost immediately with general enthusiasm. Edison’s work on electric light received plenty of public attention mainly because of detailed, and technically competent, coverage by New York newspapers. And once electricity made industrial motors the leading prime movers, there was no doubt about the importance of that change: “Electricity came in between the big wheel at the prime mover and the little wheels at the
other end, and the face of material civilization was changed almost in a day” (Collins 1914:419).
Parsons’s turbine had a key role in the swift creation of this new reality. As already described, he found a very unorthodox way to demonstrate that it was also a superior prime mover in naval propulsion by a daring public show, as his small Turbinia outpaced every warship at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Naval Review in 1897. This technical stunt was guaranteed to generate admiring headlines. And just a few years later The Illustrated London News—a weekly that was normally much given to portraits of royalty, accounts of state visits, and engravings of angelic children—devoted an entire page of its large format to the explanation of this new system of naval propulsion (Fisher 1903). More than that, the article also included a detailed drawing of the arrangement of stationary and moving blades in Parsons machine, a kind of illustration that is hard to imagine in today’s People magazine.
Perhaps the best contemporary appraisal of the era’s technical progress was offered by Edward Byrn in his 1896 essay written for the Scientific American’s semicentennial contest (Byrn 1896). Although Byrn’s assessment covered the years 1846-1896, most of the remarkable achievements noted in the essay originated after 1866, and his overall characterization of the period as “an epoch of invention and progress unique in the history of the world” would have been only strengthened if he were to write a similar retrospective in 1913. Byrn (1896: 82) argued that the progress of invention during the second half of the 19th century was “something more than a merely normal growth or natural development” and (see this chapter’s epigraph) found it difficult to convey the true magnitude of the period’s overwhelming contributions.
