The Human Story

by James C. Davis

  Now consider how iron craftsmen, those who used that glob of iron, worked and lived. Four centuries ago the town of Sheffield, England, was widely known for making scissors, knives, and blades for tools. Many of its people earned their living in those trades. They worked in shops inside their homes, using simple files and ancient methods. Their basic raw material was iron — costly iron.

  Since they produced little, they earned little and lived badly. An official report describes the Sheffielders’ lives in 1615, dividing them into three groups. At the top were a hundred families sufficiently well off to be able to help others in need. But even they were hardly rich. The report describes the heads of these households as “poor artificers.” Ten of them owned a little land, enough to keep a cow and grow some food.

  The second group was made up of 160 families who at least could feed themselves and didn’t have to beg. They could not afford to help others, and if the money-earner in a family fell sick for a couple of weeks his wife and children would be forced to beg. According to the report, both of these first two groups, the “poor artificers” and the barely self-sufficient, “live of small wages, and are constrained to work sore to provide them necessaries.” But then there was the bottom group, who made up a third of the total. They were called the “begging poor,” who could not live without some charity from their neighbors. No less than a third of the town were “begging poor.”

  EVERYWHERE THE PROBLEM was the same: how could people produce more, so that everyone could have more? The answer was industrialization.

  This lengthy word means, simply, raising your output by using aids to production. One of these aids, of course, is machines. Another is the use of power sources that have many times the strength of humans. We used to use the force of rushing streams to run machines for grinding flour, making lint for paper, or working bellows in an iron mill. Later on we used the power of steam, and later still electricity.

  Other aids to production have to do with how the work is planned — that is, with organizing workers so that they produce the biggest output possible. The use of all these things — machines, and power, and organization — multiplies by many times the work one does without them.

  The first country in the world to have an industrial revolution was England. Why England? One important reason is quite clear. In the 1700s the English, isolated from the wars of the continent, were prospering, and their number was rising. That increase caused a strong demand for basic goods, and manufacturers and inventors saw their chance.

  It was in the textile trade that they moved the fastest, and there John Kay began it all. Before Kay’s time a weaver, working on a loom at home, made woolen cloth with considerable effort. He “threw” a wooden shuttle that held a thread back and forth and in and out between two sets of lengthwise threads. In the 1730s Kay made the weaver’s work much easier. With Kay’s improved loom, the weaver, by simply pulling strings, worked two hammers that drove a “flying shuttle” back and forth on grooves. He wove much faster than before, and made a wider bolt of cloth. (However, weavers didn’t like Kay’s new machines at first because they feared the things would put them out of work. They were so hostile to Kay that he fled one textile city hidden in a woolsack.)

  Kay’s shuttles made more cloth, but they also raised a problem: his hungry looms required more thread. At this time a spinner made one thread at a time by twisting one fiber to another. But now the spinners couldn’t keep up with Kay’s productive looms; they couldn’t spin as fast as weavers wove. James Hargreaves, a poor, uneducated spinner and weaver, solved the problem. In about 1764 he invented a machine he named a jenny (for his little daughter, who had accidentally given him the idea for it). With this device the spinner turned a wheel that wound thread onto sixteen spindles at once.

  However, one man’s muscles weren’t enough if you wished to add even more rods and spin more threads. What cloth-making needed now was another source of power to run the jennies harder. Richard Arkwright, a barber, wig-maker, and business genius, invented a solution, or, more likely, stole it from another man. The key was using rivers as a source of power. He began to make machines, called “water frames,” that did what workers up to then had done by hand.

  A water frame could spin as many as eighty robust threads at once. Arkwright found some backers, and he built a mill that soon employed three hundred men, spinning night and day, and it wasn’t long before he ran ten mills at once. The former barber made a fortune, bought a castle, and boasted he would soon be rich enough to pay the national debt.

  Now a clergyman named Edmund Cartwright enters this story of machines and rising outputs. Up to this point in his life, Cartwright’s main achievement was the writing of some elegant but frigid poems. But while he was on a vacation, he chatted with some textile men and learned of Arkwright’s new machines and a problem they’d created. Now the old dilemma was reversed: weavers couldn’t weave as fast as water frames could spin. Although Cartwright hadn’t ever seen a weaver weave, he understood the need for faster looms. So with some help from craftsmen, he devised a mechanical loom that the owner could power either with a horse or with a waterwheel. By 1815 two of Cartwright’s “power looms,” with a child to oversee them, could do the work of fifteen old-style weavers.

  Iron making also had a speeding-up. We saw above how masters once had smelted iron in little furnaces. English ironmasters started using more productive methods in the 1600s, often building furnaces into hillsides to make it easier for laborers to shovel in the ore and charcoal. But changes came on faster in the 1700s, and the stimulus was the need for cheaper fuel. England’s forests were disappearing, so charcoal cost too much to use. When Abraham Darby found a way to smelt his ore by burning coal instead of charcoal, ironmasters could smelt more iron at lower cost.

  Later, Darby’s son devised a way to use a waterwheel to work a giant bellows and make a bigger, hotter fire. This made it possible to use a larger furnace, with a saving both of fuel and labor. Other men found ways to make an iron that was easier to work with, and while it was still white-hot they shaped it into bars and sheets by running it through rollers.

  Because of these and other changes, in the century after 1770, British iron output increased eightfold. Now the country had sufficient iron for many newfound uses: looms and jennies, railroads, bridges, ships, even coffins, and — this became an English specialty — machines to make machines.

  It was a Scot who created the English industrial revolution’s puffing, pounding hero. Young James Watt made scientific instruments, and he was asked one day to fix a model of a simple steam-powered engine that was used for pumping water out of mines. He saw at once the defect in this kind of engine. The cylinder that contained the steam had to be heated so that steam could push a piston, and then cooled with injected cold water (to condense the steam and create a vacuum) for the piston’s return stroke. These changes, hot to cold to hot, wasted fuel and steam.

  While strolling on a Sunday afternoon, Watt conceived a better way to make an engine. If one added a separate condenser, the cylinder need not be cooled between strokes. This change would greatly increase efficiency. It took him only weeks to make a model of his scheme but years to translate that into a working engine. He had to find a backer to supply the research money, and craftsmen with the skill to make the valves and other complicated parts. Luckily, a manufacturer had just discovered how to bore a cannon with precision, and the method was exactly right for making cylinders. Watt began producing engines that were four times as efficient as the old ones they replaced. They proved of use in iron mills, and for pumping water out of mines and into breweries and reservoirs.

  His new machines, however, had a drawback: their steam was used to drive a piston back and forth. This was fine for pumping water, but he wanted more than that. He needed to convert the motion to and fro into motion in a circle, since that was the movement needed for machines. He solved the problem in the 1780s with a series of inventions, each one simple and yet brilliant.
Soon his engines had a movement that was circular and smooth enough for all machines.

  For the whole world, this invention was a great event. Within decades, steam replaced our muscles and the waterwheel. It drove machines in mills, trains across a country, and ships around the earth. Watt’s business partner once showed a visitor through the factory where they made their engines. Pointing to the busy scene, he said, “I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have — POWER.”

  Meanwhile, businessmen were finding ways to organize the process of production. These changes were as crucial as the new machines. For example, it was clear that textile workers could no longer work inside their houses; they could hardly find room for big machines. So manufacturers like Arkwright built large factories, and the workers lived nearby in company houses, boring boxes set in rows.

  Not only where they worked, but how the workers lived had to be arranged. Six days a week, when business was good, the workers — adults, even little children — came to work at dawn, tended rows of clattering machines, and didn’t leave till dusk. Many of them had to learn a discipline that they had never known on farms or shops. No longer could they drink on Sundays and then make Monday a holiday, “Saint Monday,” and sleep it off.

  Managers found better ways to organize the work itself. In 1776 an economist described what workmen did in a pin mill he had seen. It went about like this: Worker Number One heated iron and drew it into wire, and Worker Two straightened out the wire. Three chopped it into inch-long pieces, and Four sharpened one end of each piece. Five flattened the other ends, where the heads would go. Six and Seven made the heads. Eight fastened heads to pins, and Nine painted the heads white. Ten put the pins in holders.

  When they pushed themselves these workmen turned out nearly fifty thousand pins a day. If, wrote the economist, “they had all wrought separately and independently…they could certainly not each of them make twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day.”

  Other makers carried this practice (having each worker do a different task) much farther. One was an American, Eli Whitney, who contracted in 1798 to make 10,000 muskets for the U.S. government. For the time, that number was enormous, and he promised to deliver them within a mere twenty-eight months.

  Whitney knew he couldn’t simply hire a lot of smiths to make the muskets in the usual way. A gunsmith was a skillful craftsman. When he made a musket lock (the part that makes the charge explode), he filed each wrought iron part until it fitted closely with the others. To make a few expensive muskets took a year.

  Whitney didn’t know a lot about muskets, but he did know what he called his “uniformity system.” The way to make a lot of musket locks was to break the process down to its component tasks. He hired unskilled workmen and trained them each to cut and file a single part, always to a stipulated size, over and over again. In this way, each man made a lot of parts, and these were quickly put together and (if broken) easily replaced.

  To convince U.S. officials that his system really worked, Whitney gave a demonstration. On a table before the president, vice president, and cabinet, he poured out piles of different parts, and he asked the men to pick up one of each and fit them all together. They did so, with amazement. Thomas Jefferson (the vice president) reported that one could “take a hundred locks to pieces and mingle their parts and the hundred locks may be put together as well by taking the first pieces which come to hand…good locks may be put together without employing a Smith.”

  Whitney went ahead and made the muskets. It took ten years, not two, and for a decade’s work he made a profit of only $2,500. Still, he had proved what could be done with “uniformity.” Other weapons makers later used his system with machines that turned out many weapons a great deal faster. In just one year (1863) a British firm produced 100,000, and three years later Frenchmen manufactured guns three times as fast as that.

  Whatever other makers had achieved before him, Henry Ford did bigger and better. Ford was born in Michigan on a farm outside Detroit, and he studied in a one-room school. When he was sixteen he walked to Detroit to work in its machine shops, and he got to know a new machine, the internal combustion engine.

  This power maker is quite different from Watt’s steam engine. The fuel it uses, gasoline, burns inside the engine, hence the name “internal combustion.” Expanding gases push against a piston that turns the wheels. When Ford began repairing them, thousands of these engines were already chugging in the factories and farms, powering pumps, machines, and saws.

  Ford liked to tinker and experiment, and he decided that he’d build a gasoline-powered car. He built an engine in his spare time, and he set it on the frame (the chassis) of a one-horse carriage, atop four bicycle wheels. It worked, so he sold it and used the proceeds to finance the building of a better car. With what he made from that one he built a third, and so on. By this time, other inventors had also made self-powered cars, and firms were starting to produce them.

  But Ford kept tinkering and testing. He wished to make a sturdy car that everybody could afford, what he called “a motor car for the great multitude.” He would market them not to millionaires but to the many millions of families whose incomes now were rising as America industrialized. After a decade he finally had a model that was easily produced and easily repaired. He christened it the Model T.

  To make his cars not only good but cheap Ford knew he had to standardize, to “make them come through the factory just alike.” Model Ts were certainly alike. People joked that you could have them any color you wanted, as long it was black — but they bought them. In the nineteen years that he made the Model T (from 1908 to 1927), Ford sold 17 million of them, which was half the auto output of the world.

  It wasn’t only uniformity that made the Model T so cheap. It was also the planning of production, and especially the assembly line. Ford would say he got the concept of the line when he saw how meat producers hung their slaughtered steers on trolleys overhead to move them from one cutter to another. A Ford car started as a bare steel chassis. A conveyer, never stopping, moved the chassis down the line past one man, or group of men, after another, and each performed a task. One or two installed the engine, someone else the steering wheel, then others did the hood, the wheels, the seats, the lights. Others painted, others greased, and so on to the end.

  But an assembly line was more complex than that. The parts that workmen on the line installed had just been assembled by other men on feeder lines. These parts on their conveyers reached the main line precisely at the place and time when they were needed. This system grew efficient to the point that the company produced two cars a minute.

  Ford found another way to lower costs: “vertical integration.” He did not invent this method but he showed what it could do. His costs, he knew, began the moment power shovels dug his iron from the earth, and continued till the cars rolled out the factory door. He could cut expenses if he built an empire in which he owned and ran the total process. By 1927 he had it all in place. Every morning a Ford freighter (one of many) reached the plant with ore from Ford iron mines on Lake Superior. Furnaces smelted the ore with coal brought in from Ford mines in Kentucky. A Ford factory had made the tires and a Ford glassworks the windows. A Ford sawmill cut the floorboards out of lumber from Ford’s 1,100 square miles of timber.

  Model Ts and other cars changed the lives of many millions of people. Ordinary people learned that for the first time they were mobile. A farmer hitched his “buggy” to a saw and cut his firewood, then used it to drive his family into town to see a movie. A salesman sold his city home and bought another in the suburbs. Gangsters used their cars for robbing banks, and adolescents for romance.

  NOW WE’LL TAKE a closer look at how industrialization altered lives. We will focus on a village by a stream in Pennsylvania, on America’s east coast. What happened in this setting is a capsule social history of mankind.

  Gatherers of food begin the story. Before the 1700s Indians lived around French Creek. They trapped the beaver, caught the fi
sh with nets, and hunted deer that came to drink. To this day people find their spearheads.

  In the 1700s farmers settled in this place. The first had left his home in Germany to escape religious persecution. Another farmer bought some land along the northern bank, and battled with the wolves that fattened on his sheep. By 1800 a dozen farmers, a miller, and two or three black slaves were living in this place. The Indians had left to get away from these intruders. The farmers planted wheat and corn, and tended cattle, sheep, and geese. They lived in simple houses, dressed in homemade clothes, and worked the whole day long. But with their large and fertile fields they had enough to eat.

  The future of this village (so tiny that as yet it had no name) would be connected to the water of the creek. The miller used its power to turn his wheel and grind the farmers’ wheat. Later someone bought the mill and used the waterpower to turn a circle-saw and cut up timber. But the village reached its turning point in the early 1800s when outsiders bought the mill to use in making nails. At this time, workers manufactured nails by flattening a white-hot bar of iron and slitting it. At first the French Creek makers bought their iron from other firms, but soon they built a furnace and began to smelt it for themselves. They dug the ore from bluffs beyond the creek, and bought the coal from nearby mines.