The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  Cort’s title as “the father of the iron trade” was not free and clear, even during his lifetime, since his ingenuity in the improvement of iron purity was not matched by his decidedly impure financing methods. The source of the funds26 used to purchase the Fontley forge and slitting mills appears to have been money embezzled from the Royal Navy; once this was discovered, Cort lost everything, including his patents.*

  Henry Cort’s life and works, however, also bear examination by those uninterested in embezzlement, or even metallurgy. Most histories—including, to a degree, this one—that touch on the industrialization of iron production tend to give a lot of attention to men like Darby and Cort while scanting everyone else. This is a bit like assuming that the visible part of the iceberg is the most important part. The portion of an iceberg that floats above the water line is not only a small fraction of the whole, but is “chosen” for its position as much by chance as by any real difference from the portion that remains underwater. The “underwater” story of iron purification is a substantial one: Not only had grooved rollers27 of a slightly different sort been patented by John Purnell in 1766, but puddling (under a different name) was included in Peter Onions’s 1783 patent. Other versions of puddling appeared in William Wood’s patent of 1728, the 1763 patent of Watt’s partner John Roebuck, the 1776 patent of Thomas and George Cranage (who worked with Darby at Coalbrookdale), John Cockshutt’s 1771 patent, and most telling, the four-stage technique that earned John Wright and Richard Jesson patent number 1054 in which the iron was “cleansed of sulphurous matter”28 inside a rolling barrel.

  All of which should serve as a reminder that while the industrialization of Europe was not a function of impersonal demographic forces, neither was it the work of a dozen brilliant geniuses. In any year, the lure of wealth and glory tempted at least a few hundred English inventors, but only a few achieved both.

  However, no alloy of copper, or gold, or silver produced anything like the fame and fortune of the iron trade. In his 1910 poem, Rudyard Kipling allegorized the phenomenon:

  Gold is for the mistress—silver for the maid;

  Copper for the craftsman, cunning at his trade.

  “Good!” said the Baron, sitting in his hall,

  “But iron—cold iron—is master of them all.”

  * And, to be fair, the “Struve Geodetic Arc,” which consists of thirty-four cairns, obelisks, and rocks-with-holes-drilled-in-them along a fifteen-hundred-mile chain of survey triangulations running from Ukraine to Belarus, and commemorating the nineteenth-century measurement of a longitude meridian. The work of the astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, it was indeed a noble and memorable achievement, but it draws considerably fewer tourists than, say, Stonehenge.

  * The conventional archaeological sequence that leads from stone to bronze to iron “ages” has its critics. The fact that one seems inevitably to follow the other is puzzling on the face of it, given that iron is far easier to find than copper. Many metallurgists have suggested that the fact that primitive iron oxidizes so rapidly may explain the perceived lateness of its arrival.

  * Though, needless to say, early iron smelters wouldn’t have known this (or, probably, cared), the violet color was an indication that carbon monoxide is being burned, thus showing the presence of a reducing atmosphere that could remove oxygen from the ore.

  * This is the problem with the phrase “renewable energy.” Wood is a renewable resource, but for making lumber or paper, not energy. The same adjective can even be applied to fossil fuels like oil and coal, if your time scale for renewability is measured in tens of millions of years. As a good rule of thumb, any resource that captures solar energy in the form of chemical bonds—coal, natural gas, oil, even biofuels—can always be consumed faster than it can be “renewed.”

  * Some readers may recall seeing the once ubiquitous advertisements for Charles Minard’s map of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, which earned undying fame as, in the words of Edward Tufte, “probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn.” The map uses the Réaumur scale to show the temperature confronting the Grande Armée during its retreat from Moscow.

  * The earliest steel artifacts are more than five thousand years old, but were probably happy accidents of iron manufacture; the earliest reliable steelmaking dates to about the fourth century BCE, in both Asia and the Mediterranean.

  * Sadly, no records survived Huntsman’s fear of industrial espionage, but literally dozens of progressively purer ingots of steel have been discovered where he buried them, testimony to trials at different temperatures, in different environments.

  * To the end of his life, Cort contended that he had been the victim of fraud by the Navy Office and other parts of the government; the controversy continues to this day, fueled by charges and countercharges, with as much passion as any debate about the JFK assassination.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A FIELD THAT IS ENDLESS

  concerning the unpredictable consequences of banking crises; a Private Act of Parliament; the folkways of Cornish miners; the difficulties in converting reciprocating into rotational motion; and the largest flour mill in the world

  DURING THE FIRST HALF of the eighteenth century, the technology of iron and steel manufacture experienced more innovation than it had during the preceding two thousand years: further evidence of the enthusiasm with which artisans, especially in Britain, greeted the security that both law and culture now granted their inventions. But while the new alchemists—Darby, Huntsman, Cort, and a hundred other, less well remembered inventors—were getting rich by turning base metal into gold, their coke-fueled smelters and puddling furnaces did far more to increase the supply of iron than the demand for it.

  This was a bigger hurdle for the inventors of the eighteenth century than for their predecessors, since the incentives that prompted innovations from members of the artisan class were overwhelmingly financial; Leonardo might invent to satisfy his own curiosity, or the ambitions of a Borgia, but Abraham Darby needed customers. So until orders from those customers increased as fast as production, the growth curve of the iron business was at best a straight line with a mild upward slope. And linear growth, even when driven by innovations as dramatic as the atmospheric steam engine, was insufficient, because of population’s stubborn tendency to grow exponentially.

  Exponential growth in iron production required exponential growth in iron demand. The likely source for that demand, however, wasn’t immediately obvious to the era’s ironmongers. The Royal Navy, still the largest customer for fabricated iron, was already launched (sorry) on the dramatic buildup that would see its size triple by the time of the Napoleonic Wars, but its ships were still made of wood, and driven by sails. Steam engine components were a promising enough source1 of new orders for cast and wrought iron that by 1750 the Coalbrookdale foundry alone had built the boilers and cylinders for more than one hundred and fifty Newcomen-style engines. Virtually every one of them, however, used so much fuel to pump water that the only place they were even close to economical was at the heads of the coal mines themselves, which put a severe limit on their appeal.

  This was, of course, the opportunity that Matthew Boulton saw in James Watt’s separate condenser: An invention that delivered the same amount of pumping force using half the coal would liberate steam engines from the tethers that bound them to their fuel source. And that meant that they could be used not only to pump water out of Cornish tin mines, but to pump the bellows of Shropshire iron smelters, and the hammers of Sheffield forges. The Soho Manufactory would buy iron from Britain’s foundries and sell them engines in return.

  Boulton’s February 1769 letter, the one that included his grandiloquent but persuasive offer to make steam engines “for all the world,” was tempting to Watt. John Roebuck, on the other hand, was still convinced that the Watt engine was worth a fortune, and that he was the man best equipped to bring it to market. He was correct on the first count, but not the second; throughout Roebuck’s life, his business sen
se was never equal to his vision, and his finances were, in consequence, always in disarray. In September 1769, his need for investment capital became acute enough that he offered to make Boulton a minority partner in his business. They concluded the deal on November 28; Boulton would receive one-third of the rights to the patent in return for £1,000—more than $150,000 in current dollars, about one-third of Roebuck’s investment to date; by way of comparison, Watt’s 1770 salary2 as a surveying engineer on the Monkland Canal was £200. With this money in hand, Roebuck was able to finance Watt’s continued work at Kinneil, though only fitfully. Three full months in 1770 were taken up in attempting to produce a perfectly round cylinder that would not deform under the pressure of a piston, but the ironmasters at Roebuck’s Carron foundries consistently disappointed. Three years after the deal was struck, Boulton’s one-third share in the profits from the 1769 patent had precisely the same value as Roebuck’s two-thirds: nothing. While Watt was able to support his family surveying canals, and involved himself in other of Roebuck’s ventures, the patent wasn’t generating enough revenue to buy the coal needed to boil a teapot’s worth of water. Roebuck, however, needed those profits. The eighteenth century was no less immune than the twenty-first to credit crises, and Carron’s founder was, like thousands of others, caught up in one: In 1772, Glasgow’s recently established Bank of Ayr,3 the country’s most liberal in granting credit, collapsed, bringing down virtually every other private banker in Scotland with it. In 1773, Roebuck’s business interests, an unsteady edifice at the best of times, were caught up in the panic, and he officially came before the Chancery Court as a bankrupt.

  This nullified all of Roebuck’s preexisting contracts, leaving a tangle of competing claims, lawsuits, counterclaims, and disputed assets, among them the patent right to James Watt’s separate condenser. Roebuck testified4 that he had spent £3,000 on it, the equivalent of more than sixty man-years of skilled labor, and that another £10,000 (or two hundred man-years) would be needed to make it commercially viable. This seemed a poor bargain to Roebuck’s other creditors, “none of whom,” in Watt’s own words, “value the engine at a farthing,”5 but not to Boulton. He persuaded the other claimants6 to let him take over 100 percent of the patent rights in return for £630 and an agreement to drop his claims against any other part of the estate. One can imagine them elbowing each other out of the way to get Boulton’s signature before he changed his mind.

  In December 1774, the last engine made with Roebuck had been dismantled, sent to Birmingham, reassembled, and put to work pumping the water that drove the Soho Manufactory’s waterwheels. Watt wrote to his father, “The business I am here about7 has turned out rather successful.”

  Watt’s comment suggests both a short time horizon and a modest ambition. Boulton had neither. A strategist of both vision and enormous drive, he had acquired the rights to Watt’s patent not merely because he saw in it the solution to the Newcomen engine’s limits. Britain was thick with purchasers of atmospheric steam engines who had already realized those limits. In Cornwall, for example, copper mines were, in 1775, about to shut down because the coal needed to operate their steam pumping engines was just too expensive. Nor was it the knowledge that the separate condenser had the potential to make the engines affordable for other uses; both Roebuck and Dr. William Small, Watt’s original partners, saw the potential, and saw it early. Boulton’s genius came rather in his ability to act on this knowledge, both immediately and over the next twenty years.

  The short-term objectives for the firm that was not yet called Boulton & Watt were twofold: producing a showpiece engine that would attract the business of Cornwall’s mine owners, and securing extension of the existing patent on the separate condenser that would allow the firm to profit from that business for the longest possible time.

  So long as Watt was working under Roebuck’s supervision at Kinneil, Boulton, as the minority partner, found it impossible to stay informed of the project’s successes and failures; in 1770, Watt had attempted to reinforce his balky cylinder with longitudinal supports, but when it failed to keep the cylinder airtight, Roebuck never notified Boulton. With Watt working at Soho, Boulton was able to see the project clearly for the first time, and he calculated that the firm would need until 1800 or so to break even on the investment still needed to perfect the Watt engine.

  Unfortunately, the original patent was due to expire in 1783; Roebuck’s eagerness to pursue patent protection in 1769 had returned to haunt Watt. Boulton’s simple solution was to start over and seek an entirely new patent. In January 1775, Watt, having checked in with his London patent agent, agreed, writing, “we might give up the present patent,8 and [there is] no doubt that a new one would be granted.” Boulton, so inspired, arranged for a bill requesting an Act of Parliament to be introduced in February of 1775, probably with the sponsorship of the Scottish MP William Adam.

  It’s probably overreaching to call that Act of Parliament, formally the “Fire-Engine Act of 1775,” “the most important single event9 in the Industrial Revolution” (as at least one modern historian termed it), but it does remind the observer that an invention acquires a good bit of its value from the social system in which it is created. It is also a reminder, if another were needed, that even the creators of history’s most revolutionary innovations were subject to the same conservative temptation as the most traditional guildsman: to protect advantage once it was acquired. Economists still debate whether the 1775 patent extension promoted or inhibited innovation in steam technology; even the strongest critics concede that if it did retard innovation, it did so for at most a decade, which seems modest enough in the great sweep of history. No one can doubt the importance that Boulton and Watt placed on it. And the effort they were willing to expend in overcoming any obstacles to its passage, including the opposition of the great Whig statesman Edmund Burke, whose enmity Boulton had earned by taking a different side on the question of rights for the fractious—remember, this was 1775—American colonists.

  Burke’s antagonism was unable to kill the Act, though it did delay its passage until May 10 (the same day Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold captured Fort Ticonderoga). By then, a combination of clever persuasion and judicious arm twisting had gotten Matthew Boulton what he wanted: a twenty-five-year extension. The Act reads, in part:

  AND WHEREAS, in order to manufacture10 these engines with the necessary accuracy, and so that they may be sold at moderate prices, a considerable sum of money must be previously expended in erecting mills, and other apparatus; and as several years, and repeated proofs, will be required before any considerable part of the publick can be fully convinced of the utility of the invention, and of their interest to adopt the same, the whole term granted by the said Letters Patent [i.e. the original 1769 patent] may probably elapse before the said JAMES WATT can receive an adequate advantage to his labor and invention:

  AND WHEREAS, by furnishing mechanical powers at much less expense, and in more convenient forms, than has hitherto been done, his engines may be of great utility in facilitating the operations of many great works and manufactures of this kingdom; yet it will not be in the power of the said JAMES WATT to carry his invention into that complete execution which he wishes, and so as to render the same of the highest utility to the publick of which it is capable, unless the term granted by the said LETTERS PATENT be prolonged.

  The merits of Boulton’s argument aside, the decision to pursue a private Act of Parliament is also a reminder that medieval guildsmen weren’t the only ones to see competition the same way that the young Saint Augustine viewed chastity and continence: something to pray for, sed noli modo: but not yet. Economists have studied the human predilection for shutting out competitors once they have achieved a position of prosperity, and they refer to the behavior that follows as “rent seeking.” Rent-seeking behavior is simply the practice of earning income from an asset without currently working at it. Landlords are rent seekers, particularly to the degree that the land in question is unimpro
ved, and inherited. So are monopolists. And so, indeed, are owners of copyrights and patents, so much so that one of the head-spinning challenges faced by Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith was to reconcile their antipathy to all forms of rent seeking, particularly in the form of state-chartered monopolies, with their enthusiasm for inventors and technological innovation. The British Society of Arts,11 whose mission was “to embolden enterprise, to enlarge science, to refine art, to improve manufacture, and to extend our commerce,” granted more than six thousand prizes to successful inventors between 1754 and 1784—but still refused to consider patent-holders for prizes until 1845. Neither Watt nor Boulton was averse to prizes, but they scarcely thought them worth giving up their patents; nor were they averse to work, but they knew that maximizing the value of that work required keeping their competitors from using it.

  Legal exclusion of competitors, of course, was valuable only to the degree that there was something valuable to protect, which is why, at the same time that his partner was working on MPs in Westminster, Watt worked furiously on two separate engines in Birmingham. The first was a water pump for the Bloomfield Colliery, a coal mine about fourteen miles from Birmingham, using a cylinder with a diameter of fifty inches, nearly three times the size of the Kinneil model. Watt, and the artisans at the Soho Manufactory—the Birmingham plant then employed six hundred men, with several dozen working directly with Watt—sweated over the new engine for more than a year. They were driven by Boulton’s plan to use the machine as an advertisement for Watt’s new design, principally the incorporation of a separate condenser, which meant that the engine had to be enormously powerful, highly economical, and utterly reliable—and obviously so.

  Boulton got his wish. On March 8, the Bloomfield engine was exhibited to the public amid a ceremony that recalls Thomas Savery’s demonstration before the Royal Society at Gresham College seventy-seven years before: the Birmingham Gazette recorded “a Number of Scientific Gentlemen12 whose Curiosity was excited to see the first Movements of so singular and so powerful a Machine, and whose Expectations were fully gratified by the Excellence of its performance. The Workmanship of the Whole did not pass unnoticed, nor unadmired.”