The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  28 “During the up-stroke” Hills, Power from Steam.

  29 “the greatest single act of synthesis” Usher, History of Mechanical Inventions.

  30 “designing to turn his engines” Newcommen (sic) v. Harding, TNA: PRO, C11/1247/38, 39, at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

  31 “divided the profit to arise” “Thomas Savery” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  32 Though Newcomen’s take Eric Roll of Ipsden, An Early Experiment in Industrial Organisation, Being a History of the Firm of Boulton & Watt, 1775–1805 (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1930).

  33 “Whereas the invention for raising water” “Thomas Newcomen” in ibid.

  CHAPTER THREE: THE FIRST AND TRUE INVENTOR

  1 Though already in possession of an income The estimate was made by Thomas Wilson, the Keeper of Records for the Office of His Majesty’s Papers and Records; Catherine Drinker Bowen, The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957).

  2 one estimate puts Coke’s take at £100,000 “Edward Coke” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  3 “country gentlemen, acquisitive parsons” Ibid.

  4 The idea of exclusive commercial franchises Kenneth W. Dobyns, History of the United States Patent Office: The Patent Office Pony (Fredericksburg, VA: Kirkland Museum, 1994).

  5 the emperor had the unfortunate soul executed Ibid.

  6 Coke was convinced that monopolies were costly In Davenant v. Hurdis, Coke, again as Attorney General, argued against another potential monopoly, this one a restriction by the powerful guild known as the Merchant Tailors of London. The tailors required that their members use other members on at least half the cloth they cut, effectively (or so argued Coke) creating a monopoly. See Samuel E. Thorne, Sir Edward Coke, 1552–1952 (London: Quaritch, 1957).

  7 decades before Darcy v. Allein Barbara Malament, “The ‘Economic Liberalism’ of Sir Edward Coke,” Yale Law Journal 76, no. 7, June 1967.

  8 In order to find a precedent Thorne, Sir Edward Coke.

  9 “the franchises and privileges” D.O. Wagner, “Coke and the Rise of Economic Liberalism,” Economic History Review 6, no. 1, October 1935.

  10 the Netherlands’ States-General Mario Biagioli, “Early Modern Instruments Database: An Appendix to From Prints to Patents: Living on Instruments in Early Modern Europe,” History of Science 44, 2006.

  11 “generally inconvenient” Vishwas Devaiah, “A History of Patent Law,” 2006, online article at www.altlawforum.org/PUBLICATIONS/document.2004-12

  -18.0853561257.

  12 And he liked it “Francis Bacon” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  13 to cite it in Darcy v. Allein D. O. Wagner, “The Common Law and Free Enterprise: An Early Case of Monopoly, Economic History Review 7, no. 2, May 1937.

  14 “men of far greater titles” Bowen, The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634).

  15 “we shall never see his like again” Thorne, Sir Edward Coke.

  16 “Mr. Attorney: I respect you” “Francis Bacon” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  17 “college for Inventors” Wallace, Social Context of Innovation.

  18 Tellingly, though Bacon had respect Ibid.

  19 “the inventor of ordnance and of gunpowder” Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis (London: Oxford University Press, 1956).

  20 Bacon’s faith in progress Wallace, Social Context of Innovation.

  21 “had so small satisfaction from his studies” “John Locke” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  22 in his four decades as a member of the RS Ibid.

  23 “disposing of the affairs of the kingdom” Henry Ireton, quoted in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

  24 they excluded servants and beggars Crawford B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

  25 “You and your ancestors got your propriety” Micheline Ishay, ed., The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Writings, Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997).

  26 “Let no young wit be crushed” G. N. Clark, “Early Capitalism and Invention,” Economic History Review 6, no. 2, April 1936.

  27 “Nature furnishes us only with the material” Peter King, The Life and Letters of John Locke, with Extracts from His Journals and Common-place Books: With a General Index (New York: B. Franklin, 1972).

  28 It is scarcely surprising Nigel Stirk, “Intellectual Property and the Role of Manufacturers: Definitions from the Late Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Historical Geography 27, no. 4, 2001, citing Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (London: Faber and Faber, 1997) (who also cites Lord Chesterfield’s famous “Wit, my lords, is a sort of property”).

  29 “nonsense on stilts” Paul E. Sigmund, The Selected Political Writings of John Locke (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005).

  30 “God… made the right of work” Arnold Toynbee and Benjamin Jowett, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the 18th Century in England: Popular Addresses, Notes and Other Fragments (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1902).

  CHAPTER FOUR: A VERY GREAT QUANTITY OF HEAT

  1 “the steam engine has done much more for science” Though this is traditionally attributed to Kelvin, a better (though still unreliably) documented author is the early twentieth-century Harvard physiologist and chemist Lawrence Joseph Henderson. David Philip Miller, “Seeing the Chemical Steam Through the Historical Fog,” Annals of Science 65, no. 1, January 2008.

  2 “Aristotle asserts that cabbages produce caterpillars” Martin Goldstein and Inge F. Goldstein, The Experience of Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach (New York: Plenum Press, 1984).

  3 some acceptable sinecure Mokyr, “The Great Synergy.”

  4 “the buzzword of the eighteenth century” Ibid.

  5 J. T. Desaguliers, the same critic Ibid.

  6 “the Riches, Honour, Strength” Ibid.

  7 Two years before his death in 1704 Robert Horwitz and Judith Finn, “Locke’s Aesop’s Fables,” The Locke Newsletter no. 6, Summer 1975.

  8 The first was the notion that heat D.S.L. Cardwell, From Watt to Clausius: The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early Industrial Age (London: Heinemann Educational, 1971).

  9 “fixed air” Henry Marshall Leicester and Herbert Klickstein, A Source Book in Chemistry, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).

  10 “a violence equal to that of gunpowder” W. F. Magie, A Source Book in Physics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).

  11 He then placed the water over heat Cardwell, From Watt to Clausius.

  12 “I, therefore, set seriously about making experiments” Magie, Source Book in Physics.

  13 He heated a pound of gold Cardwell, From Watt to Clausius.

  14 “the first great achievement” White, Medieval Technology and Social Change.

  15 They were, for example, common in northern Europe Ibid.

  16 Europe’s first true “wood crisis” Ibid.

  17 It also meant a lot more wood John H. Lienhard, How Invention Begins: Echoes of Old Voices in the Rise of New Machines (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  18 by the early fifteenth century Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History (New York: Perseus Books, 2003).

  19 It was not until the 1600s Lienhard, How Invention Begins.

  20 “in a state within a state” Margaret T. Hodgen, Change and History (New York: Wenner-Green Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1952).

  21 15 percent of the total were for drainage alone Wallace, Social Context of Innovation.

  22 In 1752, a study was made Pacey, Maze of Ingenuity.

  23 as late as the 1840s Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
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br />   CHAPTER FIVE: SCIENCE IN HIS HANDS

  1 In 1747, one of them Joseph Irving, The Book of Dumbartonshire (Edinburgh and London: W. and A. K. Johnston, 1879).

  2 “to clean them and to put them in the best order” Glasgow University press office, 1998.

  3 during the eighteenth century Alexander Broadie, The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

  4 “the first six, with the eleventh and twelfth Books” Ibid.

  5 “it is the principal sustenance” Henry Fielding, “An Inquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers,” in Ronald Paulson, Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1995).

  6 it had been founded “only” in 1631 Thomas H. Marshall, James Watt (1736–1819) (London and Boston: L. Parsons and Small, 1925).

  7 “foreigners, alien or English” Ibid.

  8 On the other hand, his willingness to leave London Ibid.

  9 “to work as well as most journeymen” “James Watt,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  10 “large, stately, and well-built city” George MacGregor, The History of Glasgow: From the Earliest History to the Present Time (London: Hamilton & Adams, 1881).

  11 “every thing became Science” Eric Robinson and A. E. Musson, James Watt and the Steam Revolution: A Documentary History (London: Adams & Dart, 1969).

  12 “Allow me to give an instance” Ibid.

  13 “set about repairing it” Birmingham Central Library (Birmingham, England) and Adam Matthew Publications, The Industrial Revolution: A Documentary History. Series One: The Boulton and Watt Archive and the Matthew Boulton Papers from the Birmingham Central Library (Marlborough, Wiltshire, England: Adam Matthew Publications, 1993).

  14 “the toy cylinder exposed a greater surface” Marshall, James Watt.

  15 Most textbooks plot a “boiling curve” Hasok Chang, Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  16 two different “boyling” temperatures Ibid.

  17 The measurement problem was acute enough Ibid.

  18 One small example of it Mokyr, “The Great Synergy.”

  19 In one of his notebooks Richard L. Hills, “The Origins of James Watt’s Perfect Engine,” Transactions of the Newcomen Society 68, 1997.

  20 “I mentioned it to my friend Dr. Black” Donald Fleming, “Latent Heat and the Invention of the Watt Engine,” in Mayr, ed., Philosophers and Machines.

  21 Watt didn’t discover the existence of latent heat Ibid.

  22 Heating the cylinder walls Hills, “The Origins of James Watt’s Perfect Engine.”

  23 “ran on making engines cheap” James Patrick Muirhead, The Life of James Watt, with Selections from His Correspondence (London: J. Murray, 1858).

  24 “steam was an elastic body” Birmingham Central Library (Birmingham, England) and Adam Matthew Publications, The Industrial Revolution: A Documentary History. Series Three: The Papers of James Watt and His Family Formerly Held at Doldowlod House (Marlborough, England: A. Matthew, 1998).

  25 “nearly as perfect” F. M. Scherer, “Invention and Innovation in the Watt-Boulton Steam Engine Venture,” in Kranzberg, ed., Technology and Culture: An Anthology (New York: Schocken Books, 1972).

  26 “I can think of nothing else” Watt to Lind, April 29, 1765, in Robinson and Musson, James Watt and the Steam Revolution.

  27 “the invention was complete” Scherer, “Invention and Innovation in the Watt-Boulton Steam Engine Venture.”

  28 “A Company for carrying on an undertaking” Charles Mackay, Josef Penso de la Vega, and Martin S. Fridson, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Wiley, 1996).

  29 “I am going on with the Modell” Watt to Roebuck, September 9, 1765, in Robinson and Musson, James Watt and the Steam Revolution.

  30 As a result, he tried dozens of combinations Scherer, “Invention and Innovation in the Watt-Boulton Steam Engine Venture.”

  31 “Cotton was proposed” Birmingham Central Library and Adam Matthew Publications, The Industrial Revolution: A Documentary History. Series One: The Boulton and Watt Archive and the Matthew Boulton Papers from the Birmingham Central Library.

  32 “Dear Jim… Let me suggest a method” Ibid.

  33 “what I knew about the steam engine” Ibid.

  34 “my principal hindrance” Muirhead, Life of James Watt.

  35 “relief amidst [his] vexations” Birmingham Central Library and Adam Matthew Publications, The Industrial Revolution: A Documentary History. Series One: The Boulton and Watt Archive and the Matthew Boulton Papers from the Birmingham Central Library.

  36 “have given me health and spirits” Marshall, James Watt.

  37 “the Most compleat Manufacturer” Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

  38 “I would rather face a loaded cannon” Scherer, “Invention and Innovation in the Watt-Boulton Steam Engine Venture.”

  39 “I was excited by two motivs” Boulton to Watt, February 7, 1769, in Robinson and Musson, James Watt and the Steam Revolution.

  CHAPTER SIX: THE WHOLE THING WAS ARRANGED IN MY MIND

  1 “It was in the Green of Glasgow” Robert Hart, “Reminiscences of James Watt,” Transactions of the Glasgow Archaeological Society 1, no. 1, with commentary by John W. Stephens, at http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/.

  2 By the 1990s, Ericsson’s research was demonstrating K. Anders Ericsson, “Creative Expertise as Superior Reproducible Performance: Innovative and Flexible Aspects of Expert Performance,” Psychological Inquiry 10, no. 4, 1999.

  3 When a single neuron chemically fires David Robson, “Disorderly Genius: How Chaos Drives the Brain,” New Scientist, June 29, 2009.

  4 This was expected M. Jung-Beeman, “Neural Activity When People Solve Verbal Problems with Insight,” PLoS Biology 2, no. 4, April 2004.

  5 “The relaxation phase is crucial” Jonah Lehrer, “The Eureka Hunt,” The New Yorker, July 28, 2008.

  6 Some of the results were predictable Joseph Rossman, The Psychology of the Inventor: A Study of the Patentee (Washington, D.C.: Inventors Publishing, 1931).

  7 “lack of capital” Ibid.

  8 more than half will continue to invest their time Thomas Astebro, “Inventor Perseverance After Being Told to Quit: The Role of Cognitive Biases,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 20, January 2007.

  9 “may be inventors” Scherer, “Invention and Innovation in the Watt-Boulton Steam Engine Venture,” citing Joseph Schumpeter’s Theory of Economic Development.

  10 Another study, this one conducted in 1962 Donald W. MacKinnon, “Intellect and Motive in Scientific Inventors: Implications for Supply,” in Simon Kuznets, ed., The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962).

  11 the eighteenth-century Swiss mathematician Daniel Bernoulli Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996).

  12 “The more inventive an independent inventor is” MacKinnon, “Intellect and Motive in Scientific Inventors: Implications for Supply,” in Kuznets, ed., Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity.

  13 “first scientific man to study the Newcomen engine” “Henry Beighton” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  14 Leonhard Euler applied Usher, History of Mechanical Inventions.

  15 His published table of results Jennifer Karns Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

  16 The resulting experiment Pacey, Maze of Ingenuity.

  17 His example showed a generation of other engineers Mokyr, “The Great Synergy,” quoting Cardwell, 1994.

  18 “In comparing different experiments” Pacey, Maze of Ingenuity.

  19 As far back as the 1960s Dean Keith Simonton, “Creativity as
Blind Variation and Selective Retention: Is the Creative Process Darwinian?” Psychological Inquiry 10, no. 4, 1999.

  20 “ideational mutations” Ibid.

  21 “self-perpetuating feedback loops” James Flynn, What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  22 at some point, the recruits are going to reduce Fritz Machlup, “The Supply of Inventors and Inventions,” in Kuznets, ed., Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity.

  23 In Machlup’s exercise Ibid.

  24 “a statement that five hours of Mr. Doakes’ time” Ibid.

  25 “as the greatest and most useful man” Hart, “Reminiscences of James Watt.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN: MASTER OF THEM ALL

  1 “woolen cowl for winter” From The Holy Rule of St. Benedict, translated by Rev. Boniface Verheyen, OSB (Atchison, KS: Abbey Student Press, 1949).

  2 The monks of St. Victor’s Abbey Mokyr, Lever of Riches.

  3 The distinction was the work Pauline Matarasso, The Cistercian World: Monastic Writings of the Twelfth Century (London and New York: Penguin, 1993).

  4 In 1997, a team of archaeologists R. W. Vernon, “The Geophysical Evaluation of an Iron-Working Complex: Rievaulx and Environs, North Yorkshire,” Archaeological Prospection 5, no. 4, April 1998.

  5 from the random magnetism Gerry McDonnell, “Geophysical Techniques Applied to Early Metalworking Sites,” The Historical Metallurgy Society, Data Sheet #4, April 1995.

  6 Men were smelting iron in Coalbrookdale The oldest surviving furnace at the site has a lintel carrying several dates, of which the earliest is 1638, but a dozen different operators produced iron at Coalbrookdale for decades both before and after its installation. Arthur Raistrick, Dynasty of Iron Founders: The Darbys and Coalbrookdale (London and New York: Longmans, 1953).

  7 “A certain quantity of iron ore” Agricola, Herbert Hoover, and Lou Hoover, Georgius Agricola De re metallica (London: Mining Magazine, 1912). The Hoovers—the future president and his wife—make a good case that Agricola’s description of iron manufacture was lifted, more or less unchanged, from a prior work by Vanoccio Biringuccio.