Of course none of this would have had any impact on the world of work where people sweated near blast furnaces and toiled at weaving looms had not the physical laws they studied affected the actions of lifting, pushing, and rotating. The two important discoveries for the invention of the steam engine, the pivotal innovation of the century, were the existence of a vacuum and the measuring of air pressure. And even this knowledge might have remained locked up in air pumps and bell jars had there not been a diffused conviction, since Newton wrote that nature could be made to work for human beings, that its forces could be understood and controlled.
On the Continent, where the Catholic Church was strong, Newtonian thought was suspect, treated almost as occult. Even in England, churchmen feared that too much study of nature might lead men and women to become materialists, the eighteenth-century equivalent of atheists. But in the Netherlands and England, little note was paid to these objections. Men whom we might call tutors to the world wrote books simplifying the physics that went through many editions in several languages. A participatory society had taken form with a plethora of civic organizations, self-improvement societies, bookstores, periodicals, pubs, and plays. There were popular guides to Newton, even ones written for children, and they found a ready audience. A teenage Benjamin Franklin, visiting London to learn the mechanics of printing, discovered Newtonian physics. About the same time, a young man destined to be the signature philosopher of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, spent three years in England and pronounced Newton’s theory a human triumph.30
The Church’s opposition to learning the new physics added another charge against France’s old regime among critics like Voltaire. France, bogged down with so many problems throughout the eighteenth century, came late to industrialization, but its intellectuals were fascinated by both Newtonianism and its application. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert published in 1751 a magnificent encyclopedia that wedded the speculative with the practical. The editors, both philosophers, visited dozens of workshops to write the seventy-two thousand entries about the useful arts, ranging from clockmaking to centrifuges. From it, Adam Smith apparently picked up his famous description of the division of labor.31 Diderot and d’Alembert’s encyclopedia was but the grandest of a genre that had already found publishers in England who foresaw the appeal of conveniently organized sources for technical information.
Enough curiosity existed in England to sustain fairly expensive adult courses on the new physics. Coming to the capital from the province, Thomas Paine availed himself of such classes, which later paid off when he designed an iron bridge. Young men circulating through London distributed the most sophisticated ideas of the age through the country. Soon itinerant experts were offering lecture series in Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, and lesser towns. They lugged with them hundreds of pounds of air pumps, orreries, levers, pulleys, hydrometers, electrical devices, and models of miniature steam engines. With these instruments they could demonstrate Newton’s laws of “attraction, repulsion, inertia, momentum, action, and reaction.”32 Mechanics’ institutes started with the specific goal of teaching working men how the new machines actually worked and—significantly—why.
The Inventors and Their Inventions
The pervasiveness of human inventiveness around the world demonstrates that no country, race, or continent has a lock on it. The Arabs and Chinese made critical advances in sciences long before Europeans. They also developed complicated hydraulic systems. In sub-Saharan Africa craftsmen skillfully mined and made artifacts in gold, copper, tin, and iron. Pre-Columbian Mayans, Incans, and Aztecs constructed impressive buildings without the benefit of iron or wheels. Examples like these tell us that it is not a civilization’s superior intelligence that led to the Industrial Revolution, but rather the propitious linkage of technological curiosity to economic opportunities and a supportive social environment. Put simply, it took intelligence and knowledge operating in a society that offered incentives for applying both to production processes. The ambience also had to give scope of action to individuals to experiment. Or more accurately, authorities did not have the power to divert inquiring minds from areas of inquiry and did not punish by law or through prejudice people who undertook innovations that would disturb the traditional workplace.
Two pioneering blacksmiths, Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen, were the first to exploit the new knowledge of atmospheric weight, using it to force steam to run an engine. Effective in pumping water from mine shafts, Newcomen’s 1705 invention also pumped life into a number of unprofitable colleries. Those in the know advised mineowners, who might be the Church of England, an Oxford college, or noblemen whose land had mineral deposits, to buy a steam engine. Around the same time Abraham Darby figured out how to use coke, a solid derivative of burning coal, instead of carbon from wood in blast furnaces. In a nice symbiosis, his steam engines used coal under their boilers and were used to pump water from the mines that were producing the coal. As with so many other inventions, it took almost a half century before cast iron could be made easily with coke, using the pumping action of steam engines to blast air into the furnaces.33
Newcomen’s steam engine replaced both waterwheels and bellows in mining and ironmaking, the first of an endless succession of substitutions. The machines were profligate with fuel, but England had a lot of coal. It did mean that steam engines had to be used near the coalfields in the center of England. Economists call this concentration of enterprises around coal deposits the economies of agglomeration. By that they mean that workshops, if they are clustered together, will be able to draw on a pool of skilled laborers, specialized services, and raw materials at lower prices, an unintended and beneficial consequence of what was really a limitation.34 By 1800, sixteen hundred Newcomen engines were in operation in England; one hundred in Belgium; and forty-five in France. The Netherlands, Russia, and Germany had a few; Portugal and Italy, none.35 Something new was needed to make steam engines economically viable in places where coal was scarce, but in the meantime the success of Newcomen’s machines in solving the drainage problems of coal mines turned England into Europe’s principal mining center with 81 percent of its tonnage.
James Watt, a Scottish instrument maker, entered the picture when he was given a Newcomen engine to repair. This encounter inspired him to become a mechanical engineer. Though largely self-taught, Watt drew on the knowledge from the savants he knew in Glasgow. He remained an avid reader and book collector throughout his life.36 Experimenting with the precision of a laboratory scientist, Watt puzzled over the terrible waste of steam during the heating, cooling, and reheating of the cylinders in Newcomen’s engines. For this problem, he designed a condenser to send the exhaust to a separate, but connected, chamber. He patented this invention in 1769. Like the use of steam as a force to move objects, the condenser drew upon a basic property of nature, in this case atmospheric pressure. Through a long career of making steam engines and training steam engineers, much of it spent at his factory in Birmingham, Watt continued to work on his design, transforming it, as one scholar recently noted, from “a crude and clumsy contraption into a universal source of industrial power.”
The average capacity of Watt’s late-eighteenth-century models was five times that of waterwheels, and they could be located anywhere.37 A horse could expend ten times more energy than a man. Watt started with that statistic to specify a unit of artificial energy. One “horse power” measured the force needed to raise 550 pounds one foot in a second, or about “750 Watts.” Among those industrialists who saw the possibilities of the steam engine was Watt’s son. Assiduously guided through mathematics and physics by his father, the young Watt applied himself to designing engines for ships, as did a cluster of Americans eager to find a way to carry passengers and freight up the Hudson and through the lower Mississippi rivers in the first decade of the nineteenth century. From steamships to railroads was an obvious next step, performed by George Stephenson in the 1820s. Watt and his partner, Matthew Boulton, turned out hun
dreds of engines for every conceivable manufacturing application, more than a thousand by 1819, the year of Watt’s death. They fiercely protected their patents, and unlike the many inventors who earned little from their ingenuity, they prospered. The process for getting a patent often operated like an obstacle course. Even more surprising, Watt’s contemporaries recognized the portentousness of his accomplishments.
Improved Textile and Pottery Making
The 1820s mark the beginning of the age of steam that changed the face of the earth—its atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and surface. A hundred years earlier, world population had begun the ascent that didn’t peak until the end of the twentieth century. Prompted in part by the growing number of mouths to feed, bodies to cloth, families to shelter, factories to fuel the voracious appetite for fossil fuel went long unrecognized. Looked at retroactively, the cascading effects of thousands of unintended consequences from the successive technologies of industry were horrendous. It took another century and a half for people to realize that the effects of the collective actions of billions of rather small two-legged animals had actually blown through local and regional limits to become global. Statistics carry the message: Between the closing decades of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, artificial energy made laborers two hundred times more efficient. One expert has calculated that global output grew fortyfold in the twentieth century alone.38 But that is to get ahead of the story that gathered force during the nineteenth century with engineers constantly fiddling to improve the design of Watt’s engine.
Making beautiful things also became easier with steam. Since the sixteenth century, Europeans had been importing porcelain from China. These delicately wrought and decorated pieces put to shame the heavy crockery that European potteries turned out. They also showed what it was possible to achieve. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, firms in Sèvres and Limoges, France, and Staffordshire, England, took on the challenge of matching the quality of China ware. Josiah Wedgwood led this endeavor. Born into a potter’s family, he grew up familiar with the casual organization of work in the potteries of Staffordshire. As in most crafts at the time, workers took off for wakes, weddings, fairs, and personal bouts of drunkenness. Hours were irregular, and the master potter, who typically had a shop with eight or nine journeymen and apprentices, was not much of a taskmaster. Every potter knew most of the maneuvers that turned clay into a pot, and with rare exceptions, they accomplished these tasks with indifferent success. A legendary figure in the history of industrialization, Wedgwood looked at these features as a challenge for reform.
Wedgwood approached pottery making like a scientist, an artist, and a taskmaster. He experimented with clay and quartz, blended metallic oxides, and invented the pyrometer to measure oven temperatures. He perfected a cream-colored earthenware that even the royal family used. His reputation grew from his genius at organizing his factory and molding his employees into expert craftsmen much as they molded clay into plates, bowls, and cups. Truly a visionary, Wedgwood imagined what would be ideal and then bent every effort to achieve it. Contrary to customary work routines in the potteries, he decided that his different lines would be produced in separate rooms and that potters, raised up to do every task, would instead concentrate on a single one. For producing colored ware in Wedgwood’s factory, for instance, painters, grinders, printers, liners, borderers, burnishers, and scourers worked together in a single room, along with the modelers, mold makers, firemen, porters, and packers who belonged to all the divisions.39
Wedgwood took the mixed bag of humanity on his payroll and shaped it into a modern work force. He used bells and clocks to instill punctuality. Exact record keeping enabled him to identify and fine refractory employees. He introduced women into his plants, infuriating his male employees even though they were paid substantially more than the women. He had no tolerance for the easy work habits of his father’s generation, but he did take care of his workers’ material needs, paying them high wages, looking after their health, and building houses to replace the huts that they were used to living in.
Not long after Wedgwood opened up his new factory in the northwest of England, Empress Catherine the Great of Russia placed an order for a thousand pieces of his famous creamware. When he read that the empress wanted her plates and bowls decorated with beautiful landscapes as well as depictions of ancient ruins and magnificent houses, Wedgwood realized that he didn’t have the artists to do this kind of work; nor would it be easy to train the ones he had. Somehow he was able to send 952 dishes to the empress. This close call with failure convinced him to start a school to train designers and decorators from an early age. Perhaps nothing demonstrates better his tendency to think in the long term than this willingness to shape adolescents into skilled craftsmen and women. Visitors to China had reported in amazement that seventy different pairs of hands worked on each plate issuing from a Chinese factory. The difference between Wedgwood’s organization and this extreme division of labor in China was that while Wedgwood wanted quality, he insisted upon efficiency.40
In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Wedgwood shipped tons of his creamware, black basalts, and jasperware to Poland, Denmark, Italy, South America, Germany, France, and the Low Countries. His was the standard of the day for style, artistry, glazes, material, and production facilities. When he installed steam engines into his pottery at the end of the eighteenth century, the modern ceramics industry was born. Wedgwood also helped spur England’s canal-building mania in the last decade of the eighteenth century, giving early proof of the mutually enhancing relationship of industry and transportation.41 Nature favored England with many rivers; canals enhanced their convenience.
Like the Staffordshire potteries before Wedgwood arrived on the scene, the English textile industry had clung to old production routines. Some workers were gathered in factories run by waterpower, but many men still worked at home with the help of their families and a few apprentices. Blacksmiths and clockmakers fashioned the tools with wood and a few iron parts.42 It was an industry ripe for industrialization, and cotton was the fabric that held out the best hope of success. Its fibers were easier to work with than those of wool, silk, or flax, and its market was huge. The goal was to mechanize the movements made by the hands and arms of the spinners and weavers.
Four men, working independently, transformed textile making with their inventions of the spinning jenny, the spinning mule, and the power loom, all designed to speed up the process of turning wool into thread and thread into cloth. Their differing success epitomizes the mixed fate of inventors. Both James Hargreaves and Thomas Arkwright came up with the spinning jenny, a simple device that multiplied the spindles of yarn spun by one wheel. Once it was in operation, the number of additional spindles went quickly from eight to eighty. Hargreaves was a weaver, but Arkwright had better connections to backers and was able to set up a factory where he successfully brought six hundred workers, many of them women and children, under one roof. Edmund Cartwright, a country clergyman and graduate of Oxford, became absorbed with the weaving process after visiting a cotton spinning mill. A year later, in 1785, he patented a power loom that used steam power to operate a regular loom for making cloth. It became the prototype of the modern loom. Although Cartwright built a weaving mill, he went bankrupt. Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule, which, as the name suggests, combined two inventions, the spinning jenny and the power loom. He had to sell the rights to his mule because he was too poor to pay for the patenting process.
Steam power gave the British the competitive edge in textile making, particularly cotton. They could undersell almost all Indian and Chinese producers. The market for cotton was global, and England’s fabrics were so cheap that they were able to break open many of the world’s protected markets. The boom in cotton sales put a premium on dyes as well, most of them produced in the New World. Brazilwood delivered a red dye, as did the madder plant, which came from Turkey. Human inventiveness is wonderful; somehow someone discov
ered that the dried female body of an insect found on Mexican cactus, cochineal, could produce a brilliant scarlet color. It became part of the palette for dyeing cottons. Indigo, a beautiful shade of blue, originated in India. Before the age of chemical dyes, colors were hard to come by, and wearing brilliant shades of clothing signaled wealth. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, one of the few female innovators of the period, successfully experimented with the cultivation of indigo in South Carolina. Now both climates of the colony could produce something for the world market: the wetlands with rice and the drier upland with indigo. These brilliant dyes turned yet one more luxury into a pleasure enjoyed by shopgirls and their beaux. Ordinary people could now wear purple, once the color of kings, but not without raising eyebrows at first.
Steam turned textile manufacturing into the principal industry of the nineteenth century. Cotton could be grown in more places than sugar could be, but the places were still limited. Americans didn’t start raising short-staple cotton until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793. After that, demand became ferocious, growing twentyfold in fifty years. At last the mills of Manchester had a steady supply of cotton as settlers and their slaves moved into the virgin lands of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. When the North successfully blockaded cotton shipments to England during the Civil War, Great Britain turned to Egypt, where the government had been promoting cotton production. Still later the availability of cheap power to pump water long distances made profitable cotton growing in China as well as parts of Arizona and California. But this is to get way ahead of the story of capitalism in the eighteenth century.
The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism Page 18
