by Vaclav Smil
In a complete agreement with my arguments (made entirely independently more than a century later), Byrn singled out the decade of 1866-1876 as “the beginning of the most remarkable period of activity and development in the history of the world” and headed the list of its great inventions with the perfection of the dynamo. Going through his long list of most notable advances made during the subsequent three decades would be to retrace most of the ground that is covered in this book. What is more interesting is to list some items on Byrn’s list that have not been mentioned here: compressed-air rock drills, pressed glassware, machines for making tin cans, hydraulic dredges, enameled sheet ironware for cooking, Pullman railway cars, and artificial silk from pyroxyline.
Scientific American ran another essay contest in 1913. In his winning entry William I. Wyman ranked the 10 greatest inventions of the preceding 25 years by looking for the advances that were “most revolutionary in character in the broadest fields, which affected most our mode of living, or which opened up the largest new sources of wealth” (Wyman 1913:337), and dated them according to their successful commercial introduction. Wyman’s list—electric furnace (1889), steam turbine (1894), gasoline automobile (1890), moving pictures (1893), wireless telegraphy (1900), aeroplane (1906), cyanide process (1890), linotype machines (1890), induction motor (1890), and electric welding (1889)—contains only one item that did not make it into my selection of key pre-WWI inventions, the cyanide process of gold extraction.
The process was patented in 1888 by three Glaswegians, chemist John S. MacArthur and physician brothers Robert and William Forrest, and it revolutionized the art of color metallurgy: silver and copper could be also produced by it (Wilson 1902). Its rapid adoption brought the trebling of global gold output by 1908 and made South Africa the world’s largest producer. This had major socioeconomic effects on societies whose monetary policies were based on the gold standard. More than a century after its introduction, the cyanide process—whereby ground ores are mixed with diluted cyanide [Ca(CN)2, KCN, or NaCN] and the metal is then precipitated from the soluble Au(CN)2 by addition of powdered zinc—remains the leading technique of gold extraction (Cornejo 1984), but the metal’s role in the world’s economy has been marginal ever since Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard in 1971.
Unlike Wyman and others, I refused to do any rankings in this book because interactions of many major and minor components that drive complex dynamic systems make such orderings irrelevant. Still, a closer inspection will show that even Wyman’s most questionable choices are defensible. He justified his lead ranking of electric arc furnace because of its multiple impacts: radical transformation of steel industry and indispensability for producing aluminum, and at the time of his writing, electric arc was the only promising means of fixing atmospheric nitrogen. The last role was displaced, after 1913, by the Haber-Bosch process, but the other two key contributions have become far more prominent as today’s electric arc furnaces produce more than a third of the world’s steel and all of its aluminum.
Similarly, Wyman’s inclusion of electric welding was well justified by the ability of the process to join what were previously considered unweldable metals (brass, bronze, cast iron) and to produce shapes that could be made previously only by laborious riveting. In 1964 the technique was transformed by the introduction of plasma welding that uses gas heated by electric arc to extremely high temperatures for accurate and high-quality applications ranging from work on precision instruments to repairs of gas turbines. As a result, Wyman’s identification of the most revolutionary technical advances stood the test of time quite admirably. His excellent essay, as well as Byrn’s retrospective, show that many well-informed observers were not only aware of the era’s unique contributions but also could accurately identify its most far-reaching innovations without the benefit of longer historical perspectives that would have made it much easier to point out the cases of successful, and lasting, impacts.
In contrast, one thing that could not go unnoticed by anybody who lived during those eventful decades of rapid mechanization was the widespread demise of artisanal work. This change elicited a spectrum of feelings from enthusiasm to grudging acceptance to obvious and deeply felt regrets. A difference of opinion between the two protagonists of Zola’s grand and tragic L’Assommoir—Gervaise, a washerwoman, and Goujet, a metalworker—captures vividly some of these emotions. Goujet, after watching silently as a bolt-making machine was churning out perfect copies, turned in a resigned way to Gervaise and said how that sight makes him feel small. His only solace was that the machines might eventually help to make everybody richer (as they indeed did). But Gervaise scoffed at this as she found the mechanical bolts poorly made: “You understand,” she exclaimed with passion, “they are too well made … I like yours better. In them one can at least feel the hand of an artist” (Zola 1877:733).
And although we have now been living for generations in the society whose prosperity rests on mass production of perfect copies, so many of us still repeatedly feel something of Gervaise’s regret. Indeed, we are willing to pay the premium for the greatly diminished range of artisanal products, cherishing the traces left by the hands of their creators (or naively trusting fraudulent claims of some manufacturers that that indeed is the case). But we are, inescapably, ready consumers of countless low-priced mass-produced items, and we do not even seriously consider that things should be done otherwise or that there should be opposition, violent or Gandhi-like, to reverse this pattern.
This almost unquestioned acceptance became one of the surprising norms of the entire Age of Synergy. In 1811, when young Ned Ludd smashed a knitting machine and launched a rebellion against the supremacy of mechanization (Bailey 1998), the entire process of industrialization was still in its beginnings as machines dominated only certain segments of a few industries in just a handful of countries. Two and three generations later they were ubiquitous, providing countless more reasons to oppose the diffusion of dehumanizing ways of mass industrial production—but the Luddite sentiment was not overt among the men and women whose labor created the new tools of production and served them in order to flood the markets with new goods: its most evident champions were social critics and writers, such as John Ruskin with his bleak view of the future (Fox 2002).
This reality reminds us how different was the entire worldview and how difficult it is to capture the prevailing attitudes even when the historical distance is just a matter of four generations. Above all—and in a sharp contrast with increasing frequency of immature behavior in modern society that displays so many infantile traits—most people were not burdened by unrealistic expectations. As young adults my grandparents had electric lights but no telephone, and I do not think they actually made a single phone call even late in their lives. Their diet was adequate but simple, their necessary daily walks long, and their schooling, much as their possessions, basic. My parents shared a great deal of these frugal realities, and I still experienced some of them as a child in post-WWII Europe: rationed food, a new book as an expensive and much prized possession, long daily walks or ski trips to school, delights of just a few weeks of ripe summer fruit and freshly picked wild strawberries.
At a time when the ratio of phones to people (babies included) is approaching one in the world’s richest countries, when there are just two people per car (vehicle is a more accurate term in the world of monstrous SUVs), when food costs are barely more than a tenth of the average disposable family income (even though so many items are carted out of the season halfway around the globe) and when books are being replaced by Web browsing, no amount of quiet reflection will help people growing up with these realities to grasp the modalities of pre-telephone, pre-internal combustion engine, pre-supermarket, pre-PC life. We face the same problem when trying to insert ourselves into the minds of our pre-WWI ancestors, who were surrounded by the nascent manifestations of a new civilization but benefited from them only to a limited extent.
At least I am sure t
hat my grandparents did not feel deprived because they lived and died (decades after Bell’s and Benz’s inventions) without telephones or automobiles. But the absence of a telephone or an automobile would be the least of it. Again, I think of my grandfathers, men who worked very hard with little reward to create the modern world. My paternal grandfather helped to energize it—first as a coal miner in German deep mines (figure 7.2), then as a Steiger (foreman) in Bohemian hard coal pits. My maternal grandfather helped to provide its key material foundation as he built and repaired MartinSiemens steel furnaces in Skoda Works, at that time one of Europe’s largest industrial enterprises. Naturally, by today’s standards both were poor but proud of their taxing and dangerous work, both were keen readers and bright, independent thinkers, neither saw himself as a victim, neither looked for a salvation in simplistic Marxist slogans of class struggle or in new social utopias.
FIGURE 7.2. My grandfather, Václav Smil, at the beginning of the 20th century in Homberg am Rhein. After generations of black coal mining east of the Rhine, in the Ruhr region, extraction began also on the river’s western bank, across from Duisburg. Coal was discovered at Homberg in 1854 at the depth of 174 m, and the first shaft was opened in 1876. Photograph by Otto Meltzer.
As always, intellectuals were much more willing to worship these radical solutions: their convictions led soon to the three generations of the Soviet Communist empire and later to its Maoist replica, two grand “new society” experiments that were paid for with the lives of more than 50 million people. Others were convinced that progress, so obvious in the staggering sum of new technical advances, can lead only to better and better outcomes, with technocracy and democracy triumphant (Clarke 1985). This appeared to be self-evident to such prominent creators of America’s industrial success as Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, who wrote that in America “the drudgery is ever being delegated to dumb machines while the brain and muscle of men are directed into higher channels” (Carnegie 1886:215). But that was not, obviously, the only, not even the dominant, perception: with gains came losses and worries, and too many everyday realities were hardly uplifting.
New machines and rising combustion of fossil fuels meant that even rich city dwellers could not avoid ubiquitous noise and worsening air pollution. New industries and expanding cities were also polluting water and claiming fertile agricultural land on unprecedented rates. Successful innovations that created new economic opportunities were also eliminating entire classes of labor force. And high profits, including Carnegie’s immense fortune, often rested not only on the deployment of new techniques but also on treating labor in ways that seem today quite intolerable. After the violent Homestead strike of 1892, Carnegie cut the steelworkers’ wages by 25–40% without changing the burden of 12-hour shifts seven days a week (Krause 1992). So much for the “higher channels” he invoked just six years earlier.
Nearly a generation later, working conditions of new Homestead immigrants remained hard: “Their labor is the heaviest and roughest in the mill, handling steel billets and bars, loading trains, working in cinder pits; labor that demands mostly strength but demands that in large measure … Accidents are frequent, promotions rare” (Byington 1910:133). But their wages had increased, placing their households in the upper third of the U.S. income scale, and Carnegie, retired and dispensing some $350 million (about $6 billion in 2000 US$) to charities, created a benefit fund for the employees of the company. These contrasts provide an excellent example of complexities that work against simplistic conclusions.
On an abstract level, rapid technical advances highlighted the widening gap between the impressive designs and capabilities of machines and engineering and scientific solutions on one hand and the prevailing social and economic arrangements on the other. Wells (1905:102) believed that
were our political and social and moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic operating plant, or an electric tramcar, there need now at present moment be no appreciable toil in the world, and only the smallest fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now makes human life so doubtful in its value.
But just three years before that, in his address to the Royal Institution on the discovery of the future, he offered another appraisal of the past and the future of a new civilization. This one left no doubt that one of the era’s most provocative thinkers was acutely, and accurately, aware of its special place in human history, of its evolutionary-revolutionary nature, of its immense promise (Wells 1902b:59–60):
We are in the beginning of the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. There is no shock, no epoch-making incident—but then there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. At no point can we say, “Here it commences, now; last minute was night and this is morning.” But insensibly we are in the day … And what we can see and imagine gives us a measure and gives us faith for what surpasses the imagination.
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