As governments’ response to the banking crisis revealed, banks are considered just too vital to the economies of developed countries to be allowed to fail. Governments stepped in because the ramifications of a bank collapse spread far and wide. Fractional reserves mean banks are so interdependent, with interlinked loans and investment – extended from quite small reserves – that a collapse in one place can bring others down like a house of cards, just as a public run on a bank would.[3]
It seems a dangerous system, and in some ways it is. It means most of the world’s economies are built on expectation rather than present reality. Banks lend money that they haven’t yet got to finance the continued growth of the economy. Yet the extraordinary thing is that it has worked for centuries. Without this system, Western economies would probably never have delivered the prosperity they have. There are inevitably massive hiccoughs every now and then, which bring recessions or worse. But for those who continue to prosper, the price is worth it. Maybe those who lose their homes and their jobs would not agree.
[1] A key innovation at this time was the ‘double-entry book-keeping’ system of accounting that allowed banks to keep a constant track of money coming in and going out – the cashflow – at the same time as giving a constant update of the assets, and the money available. Some experts regard this innovation alone as being the great idea that made capitalism possible – because, for the first time, it showed that there was such a thing as capital, which was defined as the wealth entered in accounts that was available for profit-making business.
[2] Originally, banks issued their own notes and in each country there was a kaleidoscope of sizes and designs. Eventually, governments began to standardise currency. In the USA, a single national currency was introduced in 1863. In the UK, the currency was standardised piecemeal throughout the nineteenth century, and it wasn’t until 1921 that the last private issue of banknotes ceased.
[3] It’s interesting, given the fact that everyone in the banking industry knows this, that the failure of American subprime mortgages that triggered the crisis was allowed to happen. It doesn’t, at first sight, make sense. But during the US government Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s examination of the role of investment bankers Goldman Sachs in the events, Goldman Sachs made it clear that they had not hidden from clients the risk that securities based on the subprime mortgages could fail. Instead they were ‘hedged’, so that if they did fail, the clients would actually benefit.
#37 The Steam Engine
Right from the start, steam engines have attracted a quite unique mixture of affection and awe. Their continual bursts of steam make them seem like living, breathing animals, panting faster and faster as they work harder. With just fleeting outbursts of snorting unpredictability, these proud, wild beasts have willingly submitted their strength to our bidding, and we feel grateful that they have.
In August 1830, the young actress Fanny Kemble,[1] fresh from her triumph as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden, travelled on a trial run of the world’s first steam passenger railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Much to her delight, she rode on the footplate of the locomotive with the line’s creator, the engineer George Stephenson. Fanny found it all tremendously exciting. ‘A common sheet of paper is enough for love,’ she wrote in a long, enthusiastic letter to a friend, ‘but a foolscap extra can alone contain a railroad and my ecstasies.’ She goes on to describe the locomotive as a ‘fire-horse’ and ‘this snorting little animal, which I felt rather inclined to pat’:
She goes upon two wheels, which are her feet, and are moved by bright steel legs called pistons; these are propelled by steam, and in proportion as more steam is applied to the upper extremities (the hip-joints, I suppose) of these pistons, the faster they move the wheels; and when it is desirable to diminish the speed, the steam, which unless suffered to escape would burst the boiler, evaporates through a safety-valve into the air …
What’s so striking in Fanny’s description is not just the animal qualities she bestows upon the locomotive, but her wonderful explanation of how it works. Fanny was a bright girl and she had George Stephenson to instruct her, but it is clear she understood it all well. It’s this visibility of the steam engine’s workings that seems to inspire that sense of both familiarity and awe that people feel for few, if any other, machines.
The idea of steam power is surprisingly old. Indeed, it dates back well over 2,000 years. As long ago as the third century BC, a Greek inventor in Alexandria called Ctesibius realised that steam jets from the spout of a kettle quite powerfully. He began to play with the idea of an aeolipile or wind ball, a round kettle on a pivot that could be set spinning by jets of steam gushing from nozzles either side. About 350 years later, another Alexandrian, named Hero, created a working design for an aeolipile, which a recent reconstruction shows works perfectly.
Hero’s device, though, was simply a plaything, and although various inventors experimented with steam, it was another 1,600 years before the first practical steam engine was built. The breakthrough was the discovery of the vacuum and the power of air pressure in the mid-seventeenth century. In a famous demonstration in 1663, Otto von Guericke showed that atmospheric pressure was powerful enough to hold the two halves of a sphere drained of air against the pulling power of eight strong horses. This discovery opened up a completely different way of using steam to Hero’s jets. Instead of using steam’s expansive power, it could use the massive contraction when it cools and condenses. French inventor Denis Papin realised in the 1670s that if steam is trapped in cylinder, it will shrink dramatically to create a powerful vacuum as it condenses.
In 1698, English inventor Thomas Savery built the first full-scale steam engine using this principle. He created a pump by blowing steam into the pump’s pipe, then cooling it to make it condense and shrink and so draw water up the pipe. Savery’s engine was used in a number of the new deep coal mines of the time where flooding was a problem, but the high pressure in the system led to an explosion that eventually put an end to his invention.
When Devon ironmonger Thomas Newcomen built his new engine in 1712, he avoided this danger by boiling the water separately and sending the steam at low pressure into a cylinder with a piston. Steam was let into the cylinder to push the piston up, then a valve closed, cold water was sprayed in and the steam condensed, creating a vacuum that pulled the piston down. The piston was attached to a pivoted beam, and as the piston pulled down, it pulled the other end of the beam up, drawing water from up to 45 metres down in the mines where the engine was installed.
Newcomen’s engine was so successful that soon thousands of them were installed in mines across Britain and Europe. The steam engine had arrived. But the key technological breakthroughs had not yet come, and the man who made them was Scottish inventor James Watt. Watt’s first innovation was to add a separate condenser to condense the steam outside the cylinder and save chilling it down continually and wasting a lot of heat. His second innovation was to introduce steam from both sides of the piston, so that it could condense and contract from either side alternately. With Boulton & Watt’s[2] double-action steam engine, the Age of Steam began.
It’s hard to overstate the impact that the steam engine had. Steam gave people a previously unimaginable source of power. Linked to the new machines of the age, it enabled a few men to produce in a few hours what might have taken an army a month to produce. Indeed, it created a new breed of man: the industrial magnate. When Samuel Johnson’s amanuensis Boswell visited the Soho, Birmingham mill of Matthew Boulton in 1776, he wrote: ‘I wish Johnson had been with us … The vastness and the contrivance of some of the machinery would have “matched his mighty mind”. I shall never forget Mr Bolton’s expression to me: “I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have – POWER.”’
The factory age had already begun with water wheels driving the belts that ran the weaving and spinning machines in northern textile towns in Britain. But the steam engine took the factory revolution
to a whole new level. Water wheels could be installed in only a very few places where the river was wide and deep enough, and they were highly dependent on the flow. Steam engines provided much more power, reliably and consistently, and could be installed pretty much anywhere they were needed. Soon they were being put into factories and workshops, mines and mills, pumping water, running machines, lifting weights. Chimneys venting the fumes from the engines filled the skies with smoke as factories marched across the landscape, and new towns mushroomed around them. For the first time in the history of the world, powered by steam, industry was becoming the driving force of society.
At the start of this Industrial Revolution, horse carts and waterways were quite enough to carry raw materials to the mills, and finished products away. But soon the mill owners began to look for a way to move things faster, farther and in larger quantities – both to cope with rising demand and to beat the competition. And that’s where a new kind of steam engine came in.
This first generation of engines was all static – too big and heavy to ever be used for transport. But then in 1799, Cornishman Richard Trevithick created an incredibly compact, powerful little engine by using high-pressure steam to force the piston down rather than the vacuum of condensing steam to pull it. In 1804, Trevithick mounted his engine on a carriage and set it on a rail track to create the first steam locomotive. It was George Stephenson and his son Robert, though, who initiated the railway age with the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which opened in 1825, and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway five years later.[3]
For a century, the steam engine was the driving force behind the most dramatic transformation of the human world in history.[4] Static steam engines powered the vast factories that churned out everything from girders to cotton trousers in mountainous quantities. Steam trains carried raw materials and finished goods to and from the factories, as well as a rising tide of passengers, able to travel considerable distances to work every day for the first time in history.
Starting in Britain, nation after nation saw an astonishing growth in wealth creation, industrial might and, especially, cities. In the USA, for instance, the urban population, which totalled just 7 per cent of all Americans in 1820, rose to over 51 per cent by 1920, during which time New York grew from just 124,000 people to almost 8 million, while Philadelphia grew from 64,000 to 2.4 million. And in the barely inhabited West, hundreds of new cities sprang up as the new railroads marched across the landscape. Railroad pioneer Charles Francis Adams commented enthusiastically: ‘[T]he young city of the West has instinctively … flung herself, heart, soul, and body, into the movement of her time. She has realized the great fact that steam has revolutionized the world, and she has bound her whole existence up in the great power of modern times.’
Then, in the early twentieth century, steam suddenly seemed to go into decline, superseded, it seemed, by electricity and the internal combustion engine. Railways appeared to be fighting a losing battle against the rising tide of traffic on the roads, and even on railways steam locomotives gave way increasingly to diesel and electric. In Britain, the birthplace of steam railways, the last steam train ran in 1968. In the USA it ran in 1962 and in China in 2005. Meanwhile, factories switched even more rapidly to electricity to power their machines. The cloud-filled Victorian landscapes of chimneys and smokestacks are now a distant memory.
Yet steam power has not vanished at all; it has simply slipped behind the scenes. All but a tiny proportion of the world’s electricity is generated by steam. Some power stations burn coal, others oil or gas, or consume nuclear fuel, but they all use the heat to create steam to drive the generator turbines.[5] So when you switch on your computer, the chances are you are using steam power. When you put your laundry in the washing machine, you are using steam power. When you travel in the electric metro, it’s really steam-powered. So are the city lights, the electronic displays at the airport, and every other aspect of the modern world that relies on electricity. Steam may now be invisible where you are, but its power is everywhere.
What’s more, the steam engine has far from disappeared. Cracks are beginning to widen in the image of the internal combustion engine, with its raging thirst for oil, and the huge wodge of carbon and other pollutants it belches into the atmosphere. Many engineers are arguing that twenty-first-century steam technology, known as Advanced Steam, could offer something much better. Steam engines are not restricted to burning high-grade oil like petrol and diesel engines; they can be made to run on virtually anything that burns. Moreover, they produce maximum turning force from the word go, so they don’t need clutch and gears, which sap efficiency. And they can run on much less fuel than petrol and diesel engines, so could be cheaper to run and much less polluting. In Switzerland and Austria, steam trains have recently been reintroduced with some success.
Back in 1781, soon after James Watt created his first steam engine, Erasmus Darwin (the evolutionist’s grandfather) wrote this startling evocation of the future of steam:
Soon shall thy arm, UNCONQUER’D STEAM! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying-chariot through the fields of air.
None of these predictions quite came true, though people did experiment with steam cars and steam-powered planes, but steam is indeed unconquered as the source of power that drives our modern world.
[1] Four years later, Fanny Kemble married American Pierce Butler, heir to a fortune based on tobacco, cotton and rice grown by slave labour. When Butler inherited, Fanny saw to her horror the reality of slavery for the first time. When Butler refused to do anything about the slaves, she left him. Some years later she published her account of the plantations, one of the best eyewitness views of the reality of slavery in the Deep South, and became an outspoken critic of slavery, writing: ‘I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty. Knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful institution.’
[2] Boulton & Watt was the partnership established in 1775 by James Watt and his English business partner, Matthew Boulton, to manufacture Watt’s revolutionary engine design.
[3] Investors were by no means convinced of the future of steam locomotives at first, and loco engineers had to prove their machine’s worth in a series of public show trials. In America in 1830, Peter Cooper had to run his locomotive Tom Thumb against a horse-drawn train. The horse won, but Cooper did just enough to keep investors on board. In Britain, before the world’s first passenger railroad opened between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, company directors were not convinced that stationary engines hauling trains with cables might not be better than locomotives. So on 6 October 1829, they held a celebrated trial at Rainhill, in which five locomotives competed before a crowd of over 10,000. The trials were won by Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, which covered 35 miles in 3 hours 12 minutes. Hauling 13 tons of loaded wagons, the Rocket averaged over 12 mph and at one point reached 25 mph.
[4] Not every scholar agrees that steam was the key factor in urbanisation. Washington academic Sukkoo Kim argues that it was the factory process, not steam, that was key.
[5] Many power companies, such as Con Edison in Manhattan, even pump the steam from generators into houses around the power station for heating.
#36 Pottery
Pottery is ever our companion when we eat and drink. Pottery cups and mugs hold tea and coffee in a way that is secure and warm. Pottery plates and dishes provide a smooth, hygienic and non-tasting container or support for our food. Other interlopers have come and gone – glass, metals, wood, plastic, paper and even bread[1] – but now it seems we have settled on pottery for most of our dining needs. It’s simple, cheap, long-lasting and even in its plainest form, attractive.
Pottery has been around such a long time that archaeologists have often used it as a way to identify different prehistoric cultures. A late Neo
lithic people who lived in north and west Europe some 3,800–4,400 years ago are now known as the Beaker people, for instance, because of the distinctive bell-shaped pottery beakers they made – mostly for drinking beer but also for storing food and even smelting copper ores. Another group, which lived in northern Europe 4,450–4,900 years ago, is known as the Corded Ware culture because of the rope patterns on their pottery. It’s not necessarily that pottery was absolutely central to these cultures; it is simply that distinctive fragments of their pottery have survived when most other traces have long vanished.
It used to be thought that pottery was invented only once people had begun to settle down on farms. Archaeological discoveries in the Middle East seemed to confirm that, with no evidence of pottery until about 8,000 years ago, some time after the first farms and cities appeared in this part of the world. In the Zagros Mountains in modern-day Iraq, for instance, people did not start to make pottery until 6300 BC, some 2,000 years after beginning to cultivate wheat and barley, keep cows and sheep and live in villages. But then pottery was found at Odai Yamamoto in Japan that dates back 12,500 years, long before the coming of farming. The hunting and gathering people who created this pottery,[2] which is surprisingly delicate and well-made, are known as the Jomon culture because of the distinctive cord marks or ‘jomon’ on their pots. In 1998, improved dating techniques put the date for some shards of Jomon pottery back a further 4,000 years, making them 16,500 years old. Clearly, having pots and an unsettled lifestyle were not incompatible.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 9
