The transition from flowing waterwheel to steam-driven factories wrought a fundamental change in the way society was organized. Early water-flow-powered factories had been located at remote, rural sites where waterpower could most easily be exploited year-round—indeed, English streams had a comparative advantage over would-be competitors in southern Europe where similar-sized streams tended to run low or dry in summers. Labor came to these rural factories, often in the form of live-in child workers from foundling homes and workhouses. With the application of steam, everything changed. Factories moved out of the rural stream valleys and relocated in towns and cities, closer to their markets and where the key inputs of wage labor and coal were abundant and cheap. Steam, in short, brought industrial urbanization. Huge textile factories sprang up. Manchester, which had only two factories in 1782, had 52 two decades later. English cotton output surged, while its production costs and selling prices plunged.
Cotton exporters soon gained a stranglehold on markets throughout the world. Thanks to factory production, by 1789 British factories using Indian cotton were able to produce goods less expensively than Indian hand weavers themselves. In this manner, the rise of Britain’s steam-powered factory system became interlinked with the political economy and militant expansion of British colonialism. The voracious intensity of the manufacturing expansion and its impact on local and distant societies can be apprehended in the fact that in a mere thirteen years between 1789 and 1802, British raw cotton imports for spinning accelerated twelvefold, from 5 million pounds to 60 million pounds, versus a fivefold growth over the preceding ninety years. The need to secure overseas raw material supplies and end-markets for the tide of British-made goods inexorably became a central focus of official British government policy and motivation for many nineteenth-century British naval missions.
The steam engine’s catalytic effect on the expansion of the factory system of production was spectacular. Almost overnight, the production of goods was transformed from a centuries-old handicraft industry performed largely by individuals at home into a collaborative, standardized and mechanized system performed at a common factory location by large employee teams on precise time schedules. From about 1780, industrial growth in Britain startlingly quadrupled from an average 1 percent to 4 percent per year, and remained at that elevated level for about a century.
Watt worked continuously to improve the steam engine, experimenting with steam pressures, valves, and cylinder designs—and trying to stay one step ahead of patent infringers, including John Wilkinson, who pirated around the edges of Boulton and Watt’s design. In 1788, at Boulton’s suggestion, Watt added a governor to automatically regulate engine speed, and in 1790, a pressure gauge. By the end of the eighteenth century, Watt’s steam engine was far more powerful and fuel efficient, as well as smaller and more portable, than the one they had begun selling less than a quarter century earlier. The average engine generated about 25 horsepower, although many were capable of up to 100 horsepower. Watt, sixty-four, retired as contented, healthy, wealthy, and celebrated in his own time as any man could reasonably hope to be when Boulton and Watt’s original twenty-five-year partnership disbanded in 1800. He died in 1819, at age eighty-three.
In all nearly 500 Boulton and Watt steam engines were sold by 1800. The uses to which they were put provided a time capsule snapshot of the era’s most dynamic activities. A large number were used to pump water out of coal and tin mines. Others were used to drive the bellows in blast furnaces that were producing Britain’s fast rising output of high-quality cast iron. Most frequently, by the end of the century, they directly powered factories for cotton, wool, beer, flour, and china. In 1786, all London came to marvel at the spectacle of two steam engines driving fifty pairs of millstones at the world’s largest flour mill. Many of the original Boulton and Watt engines were used to raise ever larger volumes of river water for delivery to expanding urban water supply systems.
The delivery of freshwater for drinking, sanitation, and other domestic uses had been an increasingly critical challenge as cities grew in population size and density. Waterwheel pumps installed upon urban rivers in the seventeenth century represented the first advance in domestic water supply provision in Europe since the aqueducts of ancient Rome, even though polluted water and insufficient pumping power remained constant problems. The Seine at Paris had a single undershot-waterwheel-powered pump below the recently built Pont Neuf as early as 1608, and added another at the Pont Notre Dame in 1670. The largest and most famous waterworks of the seventeenth century was installed in 1684 on the Seine to serve Louis XIV’s royal fountains and gardens at Versailles. It featured 14 undershot wheels, each nearly 40 feet in diameter, turned by water derived from a dam in the Seine and powering 259 pumps that raised 800,000 gallons of water per day more than 500 feet in three stages. The Thames had a waterwheel pump under the London Bridge as early as 1582. But it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666—disastrous fires being another constant peril of urban life until the application of steam pumps to firefighting.
Steam power first had been applied in 1726 on both the Thames and the Seine with the placement of early Newcomen engines. Much larger Newcomen engines were added in London after 1752. Yet the engine’s inefficiency goaded John Smeaton, the father of modern civil engineering, to conduct methodical scientific investigations into ways to enhance it—in much the same spirit of the age that impelled Watt soon thereafter to explore ways to improve the Newcomen engine. One of the earliest Boulton and Watt steam engines was installed at London in 1778 and pumped water through the city’s network of wooden pipes for distribution to households three times per week. Watt steam engines tripled the average daily water supply of water-starved Paris from about one to three gallons per person after the Périer brothers, Jacques and Auguste, installed powerful steam pumps at two locations on the river in 1782 that lifted the river water 110 feet. Reflecting a repetitive pattern of history, first served was the wealthy Saint-Honoré district, while Paris’s 20,000 omnipresent water carriers, who toted two buckets per delivery 30 times per day were left to anxiously contemplate the inevitable demise of their long-lived profession and livelihood. In America, Philadelphia earned admiration from visitors for its Fairmount Waterworks on the Schuylkill River, opened in 1815 in response to the public clamor against the city’s industrially polluted, fetid, and insufficient water supply. Fairmount soon became the most profitable enterprise in Philadelphia. Its steam-powered pumps were designed by native son engineer Oliver Evans, based on a high-pressure system that Watt himself had eschewed as too dangerous. Water was pumped up to a hilltop reservoir and distributed by gravity flow throughout the city in log and cast-iron pipes. Evans’s steam engines remained in use only until 1822, however. Due to explosions that shut down the water system, they were replaced by a battery of lower-tech, but more reliable, waterwheels, and after 1860 by water turbines.
Just as revolutionary as the application of steam power to factories was its use in powering the bellows that heated Britain’s blast furnaces. Steam power facilitated the mass production of high-quality, inexpensive cast iron—which quickly became the great building material of the industrial age. Until then, limited forged iron supplies had been reserved mainly for making British naval cannons and other vital equipment. Steam power and iron had a dynamic synergy that galvanized a virtuous circle of self-reinforcing economic expansion that made them the core technology cluster of the second, mass production phase of the Industrial Revolution. Steam power helped cast more iron; more iron produced durable devices and applications to which steam power could be applied. With its blast furnaces working at full capacity, England’s iron production soared more than twentyfold to nearly 1.4 million tons in the half century from 1788 to 1839.
The synergy between steam and iron was displayed in Boulton and Watt’s interrelationship with iron master Wilkinson, who both fabricated key precision parts for Watt engines and used one engine to drive his own influential iron bellows. Wilkinson also
employed a 20 pound, steam-powered hammer to pound his cast iron at 150 strokes per minute. Wilkinson’s many innovative iron applications included the first iron-hulled river barge in 1787, which carried coal and iron along the Severn River. He built the first iron bridge across a river—the Severn at Coalbrookdale—and a steam-powered threshing machine. His major client was the British military, which depended upon his large furnaces for building the cannon and artillery used by Horatio Nelson and others to defeat Napoléon. Wilkinson kept experimenting with iron right to the very end of his life—he even designed the iron coffin in which he was buried.
Paradoxically, another of the important early uses of the steam engine, including by Boulton himself at his small metal goods factory at Birmingham, was to lift water to accelerate the turning rate of conventional waterwheels. The power output of waterwheels was vastly enhanced by the supplemental flows lifted by steam-power and the design of large, all-iron wheels. By the early nineteenth century, the most powerful waterwheels generated a stunning 250 horsepower—and remained more cost effective than coal burning steam engines. In the 1830s, the power generated by falling water was significantly augmented by the French invention of the hydraulic turbine. In latter nineteenth-century America, for example, the Mastodon Mill on New York’s Mohawk River generated 1,200 horsepower by taking water into its giant turbines through 102-inch-diameter pipes to drive 10 miles of belts, 70,000 spindles, and 1,500 looms. which produced 60,000 yards of cotton per day. Thus the use of waterpower continued to grow alongside steam. Only after the mid-nineteenth century did steam visibly supersede waterpower.
The harnessing of steam energy shattered the waterwheel-power barrier that for 2,000 years had been the ceiling of mankind’s command over Earth’s inanimate energy resources. Steam utterly transformed the speed, scale, mobility, and intensity of man’s material existence. The fundamental nature of human society was reshaped, and propelled history in entirely new, previously inconceivable directions. The overwhelming benefits accrued first to the West, whose economic trajectory took off with seemingly magical force.
Within a few decades, steam power was propelling iron locomotives, riverboats, oceangoing gunboats, large dredgers, and earthmoving equipment. The face of Earth was literally resculpted by immense hydraulic civil engineering undertakings. Mass production factories swallowed handicraft trade. Small cities first born in the ancient, irrigated agricultural civilizations became giant metropolises. The most amazing transformation of all was that for the first time in human history the prodigious wealth created by the intensified uses of water and other productive resources outstripped the record-shattering eruption in human population—causing individual living standards, as well as individual health and longevity, to perceptibly rise from one generation to the next.
Except for relatively short-lived, localized spurts, nothing like it had ever before happened in human history. All previous economic gains had been so slowly accrued that they were visible in retrospect only as a gentle increase in the supportable level of a society’s population. Changelessness had been the enduring condition of daily life, from birth to death, century after century. As recently as the three centuries from 1500 to 1820, for instance, average world economic production per person rose a mere 1.7 percent per century. Over the next eighty years of early industrialization, by comparison, it nearly doubled, then quadrupled again in the late twentieth century. This unprecedented leap forward in individual living standards from 1820 to 2000 occurred even as overall world population was soaring from 1 to 6 billion. With the sudden explosion of economic wealth, a revolutionary new social concept infiltrated human politics, economics, and society—an expectation of progress.
That the stupendous break from all previous growth trend lines itself was accompanied by a stunning enlargement in the accessible supply of freshwater was no historical anomaly: in every age from the advent of irrigated agriculture, rising civilizations seem to have experienced contemporaneous, quantum leaps in the availability or exploitability of their water resources. The Industrial Revolution intensified this pattern. From 1700 to 2000, freshwater use grew more than twice as fast as human population. In the twentieth century alone, world water use would multiply ninefold—comparable in impact on society to the thirteenfold increase in energy use. Indeed, the unprecedented prosperity and population growth of the industrial age was driven as much by voluminous use of freshwater as it was by cheap fossil fuel energy. The augmented supply, in turn, stimulated still greater demand for new and existing uses of water.
As in all great water breakthroughs, steam transformed water’s extraordinary, latent catalytic energy potential into productive use. But steam power’s impact was exceptionally seismic because it leveraged further innovations throughout all man’s primary realms of water use—economic production in industry, agriculture and mining; domestic uses for drinking, cooking, and cleanliness; transportation and strategic advantage in commerce, communication and naval power; and not least in energy generation itself, where it set in motion a cascade of advances that exponentially multiplied mankind’s ability to tap nature’s energy for his purposes.
Just as river irrigation came to be the defining fulcrum of ancient hydraulic states, steam power stamped an indelible imprint on the essential character of modern industrial society. The mobility of steam power freed man for the first time in history to deploy significant power anywhere and anytime. Paradoxically, this both democratized society and deepened fundamental pillars of hierarchical control. On the one hand, small-scale steam power promoted decentralization, diversity of activity, and pluralism of interests. On the other, within established sectors, it enabled steam power Haves to better exploit economies of scale and amass oligopolistic concentrations of economic power and wealth. In warfare, the cost-benefits of steam power were less ambiguous. It fostered greater state control over organized violence and the rise to preeminence of more solidly entrenched nation-states.
Thanks to steam people moved much faster and farther than ever before imagined. The farthest distance a man could cover in a single day from antiquity to the mid-nineteenth century by sail, oar, or horseback had been 100 miles per day; suddenly, steam power enabled him to traverse 400 miles per day by ship or rail. The pace of communication, trade, and large-scale human movement between places accelerated. Thus began the historic defeat of distance that marked the transportation and communication revolutions and evolved into the oceanic, intermodal sea-to-rail, containerized shipping and telecommunications web of the twenty-first century, cornerstones of the integrated information age society.
Richard Trevithick built the first steam locomotive, or “Iron Horse,” in 1802 in Shropshire. When long iron bridges were engineered to carry trains over rivers and other landscape barriers, steam engine railroads superseded canal and barge transport systems in transporting coal, other freight, and people across continents. The U.S. transcontinental steam railroad drove its final, golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869. The fabled Orient Express made its debut run from London to Paris to Istanbul in 1888.
In water transport, wood and sail was superseded by a more tightly interlinked oceanic era of iron and steam. American Robert Fulton ordered a Boulton and Watt steam engine to power the maiden voyage of his 100-ton steamboat, the paddle-wheel driven Clermont, up the Hudson River in 1807, which opened the era of commercially successful river steamboats. Fulton’s was not the first river steamboat, nor even the first in America. In 1778, the eccentric, ill-starred American inventor John Fitch sailed a ship named after himself on the Delaware, but failed to establish a successful business model. Soon steamboats were servicing America’s Great Lakes and Mississippi; Europe’s wide rivers like the Rhine, Danube, Rhone, and Seine; and appeared in the Mediterranean, the English Channel, and the Baltic Sea. In 1819 the Savannah, powered by a 90-horsepower engine that turned a collapsible paddle wheel, became the first steam-power-assisted ship to cross the Atlantic, covering the distance in twenty-seven
and a half days, though using her engine only eighty-five hours. Regular transatlantic service started in 1838. A journey that routinely took sailing ships two months required only nine days by fast steamer in 1857. By 1866, after ten years of effort, Cyrus W. Field successfully laid a communications cable under the Atlantic; by 1900 there were 15 cables on the Atlantic floor, facilitating intercontinental exchanges. Without such developments it was inconceivable that 55 to 70 million Europeans could have emigrated to the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere from 1830 to 1920, relieving the chronic labor shortages that threatened to choke off America’s westward frontier expansion and Europe of its excess industrial unemployed who threatened domestic uprisings such as those of 1848.
The great age of the ocean steamer arrived after 1870 with the development of the screw propeller in the 1840s, compound engines in the 1850s, steel hulls in the 1860s—and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Steamships between China and Europe, for example, shipped three times as much cargo in half the time taken by a sailing ship. A worldwide steamship network evolved that regularly carried grain to Europe from America’s Great Plains, Argentina and Australia, while wheat, indigo, rice and rubber moved into Europe through Suez from India and Southeast Asia.
As with previous water transportation innovations, the cheaper cost of steam power helped realign geopolitical world balances. Steam made every society on Earth a potential raw material supplier, as well as a potential market, for Europe’s fast-growing industries. A relationship of subservient interdependence evolved between colonial satellites and their European masters. Outside Europe, diverse, self-sufficient subsistence economies driven by land-owning peasant farmers gave way to large, specialized single crop plantations manned by sharecropper labor producing chiefly for export to Europe and economies dependent upon imports of previously self-made goods. In the new world economic order that came into being, an ever more dominant and richer Western industrialized manufacturing center was supplied by a colonial periphery with unskilled labor and few developmental paths to garner a growing, relative share of the world’s increasing wealth.
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