Routinization: The third institutional pillar of Western science was the routinization of discovery, the invention of invention. Here was a widely dispersed population of intellectuals, working in different lands, using different vernaculars—and yet a community. What happened in one place was quickly known everywhere else, partly thanks to a common language of learning, Latin; partly to a precocious development of courier and mail services; most of all because people were moving in all directions. In the seventeenth century, these links were institutionalized, first in the person of such self-appointed human switchboards as Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), then in the form of learned societies with their corresponding secretaries, frequent meetings, and periodical journals. The earliest societies appeared in Italy—the Accadémia dei Lincei (the Academy of Lynxes) in Rome in 1603, the short-lived Accadémia del Cimento in Florence in 1653. More important in the long run, however, were the northern academies: the Royal Society in London in 1660, the Academia Parisiensis in 1635, and the successor Académie des Sciences in 1666. Even before, informal but regular encounters in coffeehouses and salons brought people and questions together. As Mersenne put it in 1634, “the sciences have sworn inviolable friendship to one another.”13
Cooperation, then, but enormously enhanced by fierce rivalry in the race for prestige and honor. In the pre-academy environment of the sixteenth century, this often took the form of concealment, of partial divulgence, of refusal to publish, of saving the good parts for debate and confutation.14 Even in the late seventeenth century, one has the eccentric figure of Robert Hooke, active member of the Royal Society, whose motto might have been, “I thought of that first.” If we can believe him, he put all manner of valuable creations in his cabinet drawers, only to bring them out when someone else had come up with a comparable device. In this way, he challenged Christian Huygens on the invention of the watch balance spring (1675), a major advance in the accuracy of portable timepieces. History has given the palm to Huygens, not only because his spiral spring was tried in a watch and worked, but also because he announced his invention when he made it. One cannot have these unprovable claims ex post, not even from so gifted a mechanical genius as Hooke.15
In general, fame was the spur, and even in those early days, science was a contest for priority. That was why it became so important to show-and-tell to aficionados, often in elegant salons; these ladies and gentlemen were witnesses to achievement. And that was why scientists, amateur and professional, were so keen to found journals and get dated articles published. Also to replicate experiments, verify results, correct, improve, go beyond. Here again the role of the printing press and movable type was crucial; also the shift from Latin, an invaluable means of international communication among savants of different countries, to the vernacular, the language of the larger public. Again, nothing like these arrangements and facilities for propagation was to be found outside Europe.
Scientific method and knowledge paid off in applications—most importantly in power technology. During these centuries, the older power devices—the windmill and water wheel—got continuing attention, with some gain in efficiency; but the great invention would be the conversion of heat energy into work by means of steam. No technique drew so closely on experiment—a long inquiry into vacuums and air pressure that began in the sixteenth century and reached fruition in the late seventeenth in the work of Otto von Guericke (1602-1686), Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647), Robert Boyle (1627-1691), and Denys Papin (?1647-1712), German, Italian, English, French. To be sure, the scientists of the eighteenth century could not have explained why and how a steam engine worked. That had to wait for Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) and the laws of thermodynamics. But to say that the engine anticipated knowledge is not to say that the engine builder did not draw on earlier scientific acquisitions, both substantive and methodological. James Watt made the point. His master and mentor Joseph Black (1728-1799) did not give him the idea for the separate condenser, but working with Black gave him the practice and method to probe and resolve the issue.16 Even at that, the heroic inventor did not give full credit. Watt was a friend of professors in Edinburgh and Glasgow, of eminent natural philosophers in England, of scientists abroad. He knew his mathematics, did systematic experiments, calculated the thermal efficiency of steam engines; in short, built on accumulated knowledge and ideas to advance technique.17
All of this took time, and that is why, in the long, the Industrial Revolution had to wait. It could not have happened in Renaissance Florence. Even less in ancient Greece. The technological basis had not yet been laid; the streams of progress had to come together.
The answer in the short lies in conjuncture, in the relations of supply and demand, in prices and elasticities. Technology was not enough. What was needed was technological change of mighty leverage, the kind that would resonate through the market and change the distribution of resources.
Let me illustrate. In fourteenth-century Italy, gifted mechanics (we do not know their names) found ways to throw silk, that is, to spin silk warp, by machine; and even more impressive, to drive these devices by waterpower. On the basis of this technique, the Italian silk industry prospered for centuries, to the envy of other countries. The French managed to pierce the secret in 1670, the Dutch at about the same time; and in 1716, Thomas Lombe, after some years of patient espionage, brought the technique to England and built a large water-powered mill employing hundreds of people.18
This was a factory, comparable in almost every way to the cotton mills of a later era. Almost…the difference was that the Lombe mill at Derby, along with the hand-operated throwsters’ shops that had preceded it and some smaller machine imitators, was more than enough to accommodate England’s demand for silk yarn. Silk, after all, was a costly raw material, and the silk manufacture catered to a small and affluent clientele. So the Lombe mill, fifty years ahead of those first cotton mills of the 1770s, was not the model for a new mode of production. One could not get an industrial revolution out of silk.19
Wool and cotton were something else again. When wool sneezed, all Europe caught cold; cotton, and the whole world fell ill. Wool was much the more important in Europe, and cotton’s role in the Industrial Revolution was in some ways an accident. The British “calico acts” (1700 and 1721), which prohibited the import and even wearing of East Indian prints and dyestuffs, were intended to protect the native woolen and linen manufacturers, but inadvertently sheltered the still infant cotton industry; and while cotton was a lusty infant, it was still much smaller than the older branches at midcentury. The first attempts to build spinning machines aimed at wool, because that was where the profit lay. But when wool fibers proved troublesome and cotton docile, inventors turned their attention to the easier material.
Also, the encrustation of the woolen industry and the vested power of its workforce impeded change. Cotton, growing fast, recruiting new hands, found it easier to impose new ways. This is a constant of technological innovation as process: it is much easier to teach novelty to inexperienced workers than to teach old dogs new tricks.*
Why the interest in mechanization? Primarily because the growth of the textile industry was beginning to outstrip labor supply,† England had jumped ahead on the strength of rural manufacture (putting-out), but the dispersion of activity across hill and dale was driving up costs of distribution and collection. Meanwhile, trying to meet demand, employers raised wages, that is, they increased the price they paid for finished work. To their dismay, however, the higher income simply permitted workers more time for leisure, and the supply of work actually diminished. Merchant-manufacturers found themselves on a treadmill. In defiance of all their natural instincts, they came to wish for higher food prices. Perhaps a rise in the cost of living would compel spinners and weavers to their task.*
The workers, however, did respond to market incentives. They were contractors as well as wage laborers, and this dual status gave them opportunity for self-enrichment at the expense of the putter-out. Spinners and weavers wou
ld take materials from one merchant and then sell the finished article to a competitor, stalling now one, now another, and juggling their obligations to a fare-thee-well. They also learned to set some of the raw material aside for their own use: no backward-bending supply curve when working for their own gain. Trying to conceal the embezzlement, weavers made thinner, poorer fabrics and filled them out by artifice or additive. The manufacturer in turn tried to discourage such theft by closely examining each piece and if necessary “abating” the price of the finished article. This conflict of interests gave rise to a costly cold war between employer and employed.
The manufacturers clamored for help from the civil authorities. They called for the right to inflict corporal punishment on laggards and deadbeats (no use trying to fine them); also the right to enter the weavers’ cottages without warrant and search for embezzled materials. These demands got nowhere. An Englishman’s home was his castle, sacred.
Little wonder, then, that frustrated manufacturers turned their thoughts to large workshops where spinners and weavers would have to turn up on time and work the full day under supervision. That was no small matter. Cottage industry, after all, had great advantages for the merchant-manufacturer, in particular, low cost of entry and low overhead. In this mode, it was the worker who supplied plant and equipment, and if business slowed, the putter-out could simply turn off the orders. Large shops or plants, on the other hand, called for a substantial capital investment: land and buildings to start with, plus machines.
Putting-out, moreover, was popular with everybody. The workers liked the freedom from discipline, the privilege of stopping and going as they pleased. Work rhythms reflected this independence. Weavers typically rested and played long, well into the week, then worked hard toward the end in order to make delivery and collect pay on Saturday. On Fridays they might work through the night. Saturday night was for drinking, and Sunday brought more beer and ale. Monday (Saint Monday) was equally holy, and Tuesday was needed to recover from so much holiness.
Such conflict within the industry—what a Marxist might call its internal contradictions—led logically, then, to the gathering of workers under one roof, there to labor under surveillance and supervision. But manufacturers found that they had to pay to persuade people out of cottages and into mills. So long as the equipment in the mill was the same as in the cottage, mill production cost more. The only operations where this law did not hold was in heat-using technologies (fulling, brewing, glassmaking, ironmaking, and the like). There the savings yielded by concentration (one hearth as against many) more than compensated for the capital costs.* Efforts to concentrate labor in textile manufacture, however, which went back in England to the sixteenth century, invariably failed. They did better in Europe, where governments tried to promote industry by subsidizing and assigning labor to large hand-powered shops—“manufactories” or “protofactories.” But this was an artificial prosperity, and the withdrawal of support spelled bankruptcy.
It took power machinery to make the factory competitive. Power made it possible to drive larger and more efficient machines, thus underselling the cottage product by ever bigger margins. The hand spinners went quickly; the hand weavers more slowly, but surely. In spite of higher wages, the mills still seemed a prison to the old-timers. Where, then, did the early millowners find their labor force? Where else but among those who could not say no? In England that meant children, often conscripted (bought) from the poorhouses, and women, especially the young unmarrieds. On the Continent, the manufacturers were able to negotiate for convict labor and military personnel.
So was born what Karl Marx called “Modern Industry,” fruit of a marriage between machines and power; also between power (force and energy) and power (political).
The Primacy of Observation: What You See Is What There Is
The great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) lived and worked before the invention of the telescope, but he was a keen observer and he knew all the stars he could see in the sky. And these were all there were supposed to be. One night in November 1572, however, he saw something new in the heavens, a point of light in the constellation Cassiopeia that should not have been there. This troubled him, so he asked his servants whether they saw what he saw, and they said yes, they did. For a moment he was satisfied, at least regarding his power of sight; but then he began to worry that his servants had merely wanted to reassure him and were reluctant or afraid to contradict their master, for he knew himself to be a man of pride and temper. (He had lost his nose in a duel as a youth and wore a copper—some say silver—prosthesis.) So he went out into the street and stopped some passing peasants and asked them the same question. They had nothing to gain or lose by telling the truth, and no one could be more matter-of-fact than a peasant. And they also said they saw the light. And then Tycho knew that there were more things in heaven than were dreamt of in his philosophy. He wrote up his observations in a pamphlet, De nova, Stella, published in Copenhagen in 1573, a monument in the history of science.
A note of caution: Tycho, for all his show-me empiricism, sought to find a middle way between Ptolemy and Copernicus by having the sun, circled by the planets, revolve around the earth. It takes good induction as well as good observation to do good science.
Masters of Precision
All studies of change and rates of change have to measure elapsed time. To do this, one needs a standard unit of measure and an instrument to count the units; we call that a clock. In the absence of a clock, one can substitute approximate equivalents. The seamen of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who wanted to count the time it took for a float to go from bow to stern by way of estimating the speed of the vessel, might use a sandglass; but if they did not have one, they could always recite Hail Mary’s or some other conventional refrain; and today any practiced photographer knows that one can count seconds by reciting four-syllable expressions: one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand…
Needless to say, such idiosyncratic improvisations will hardly do for scientific purposes. For these one needed a good clock, but it took four centuries to make one. Still, scientists are ingenious people, and they found ways to enhance the precision of their pre-pendulum, pre-balance spring timepieces. One way was to use clocks with very large wheels with hundreds and even a thousand or more teeth. Tycho Brahe did this, and instead of reading the single hour hand of his clock (these early machines were not accurate enough to warrant the use of minute hands), he counted the number of teeth the wheel had turned and got much closer to the exact time elapsed. He did so to track star movements and locate these bodies on celestial maps (time was one of the two coordinates). Galileo needed even closer measurements for his studies of acceleration. Ever ingenious, he used small, hand-held water clocks rather than mechanical clocks, opening and closing the outflow hole with his finger at the start and end of the run. He then weighed the water released as a measure of time elapsed, for in those days, the balance scale was the most precise measuring instrument known.
The invention of the pendulum clock changed everything. This was the first horological device controlled by an oscillator with its own intrinsic frequency. Earlier clocks used a controller (swinging bar or circle) whose frequency varied with the force applied. After improvements (all inventions need improvements), a good pendulum clock kept time to a few seconds per day. Watches were less accurate, because they could not work with a pendulum. The invention of the balance spring, however, made it possible to get much closer to a regular rate, steady from hour to hour and day to day. A good pocketwatch, jeweled and with a decent balance, could keep time in the early eighteenth century to a minute or two a day. For the first time it paid to add a minute hand, and even a second hand.
These advances substantially enhanced the advantage that horological technology gave to Europe. What had long been an absolute monopoly of knowledge remained an effective monopoly of performance. No one else could make these instruments or do the kinds of work that depended on precision
timekeeping. The most important of these, politically as well as economically: finding the longitude at sea.
15
Britain and the Others
And in Europe, why Britain? Why not some other country?
On one level, the question is not hard to answer. By the early eighteenth century, Britain was well ahead—in cottage manufacture (putting-out), seedbed of growth; in recourse to fossil fuel; in the technology of those crucial branches that would make the core of the Industrial Revolution: textiles, iron, energy and power. To these should be added the efficiency of British commercial agriculture and transport.
The advantages of increasing efficiency in agriculture are obvious. For one thing, rising productivity in food production releases labor for other activities—industrial manufacture, services, and the like. For another, this burgeoning workforce needs ever more food. If this cannot be obtained at home, income and wealth must be diverted to the purpose. (To be sure, the need to import nourishment may promote the development of exports that can be exchanged for food, may encourage industry; but necessity does not assure performance. Some of the poorest countries in the world once fed themselves. Today they rely heavily on food imports that drain resources and leave them indebted, while the merest change in rainfall or impediment to trade spells disaster. At worst, they stagger from one famine to the next, each one leaving a legacy of enfeeblement, disease, and increased dependency.)
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