Iron, Steam & Money
Page 4
Around twenty years later, in 1733, John Kay, a textile machinery maker and serial inventor from Bury in Lancashire, patented the flying shuttle. This extraordinary device revolutionised the craft of weaving by automatically throwing the weft thread back and forth across the loom where previously it had been passed by hand. The productivity of each weaver was dramatically increased.
All three of these innovations were of primary importance. What Darby and Kay did was to increase pressure further along the productive system, while Newcomen provided the enormous first step forward in a journey that James Watt would follow. Over the next few decades increases in the efficiency of the economy, the expanding population, more investment and spending all added to the demand for technical innovations and, crucially, provided financial incentives for innovators.
The dam began to crack in the 1760s. First came the spinning jenny developed by James Hargreaves, perfected by around 1764 and patented in 1770. Kay’s flying shuttle had vastly increased the capacity of cotton looms and therefore the demand for cotton yarn, which hand-operated spinning wheels could not meet. After a slow start, by the 1760s the flying shuttle had spread throughout the cotton districts of Lancashire putting yarn in continual short supply. The spinning jenny opened this bottleneck by allowing one person to operate first eight, then sixteen, then up to 120 spinning wheels at the same time.
In 1769 Richard Arkwright patented his spinning frame which achieved the same ends through a different principle, and which was powered from a waterwheel. People sometimes wonder why improving the spinning of cotton thread should have had such a major impact on industrialisation, but cotton was the shock industry of its day – the equivalent of computing and the Internet today. The cotton industry’s vast potential for expansion rewarded continual innovation; it also demonstrated that rather than throwing people out of work, better machines created employment.
In the same year as Arkwright patented his spinning frame, the Scottish engineer-cum-surveyor James Watt obtained a patent for an improved steam engine. Watt’s stated intention was to save on the huge fuel consumption of Newcomen engines by condensing steam in a separate chamber from the main cylinder. (Unlike the jenny and the spinning frame, Watt’s engine was not yet built – he had patented an idea that he had tested, but not a fully working engine.) Once Watt’s first engine was built in 1776, it became clear that while Newcomen’s engine had been restricted to pumping water, this engine could be used much more widely. Mechanics all over the country began to adapt Newcomen engines with Watt condensers – either illegally or under licence.
Meanwhile, by 1772 Richard Arkwright had installed his spinning frames, together with picking, washing, carding and packing facilities, in a five-storey mill in Cromford in Derbyshire. Factories of this kind had existed before, but Arkwright opened his at a perfect time. Cotton had become more and more popular among consumers and, as mechanisation reduced prices and increased quality, the industry entered a virtuous circle of increasing demand and supply that lasted for over a century. Arkwright’s pioneering powered cotton mill was rapidly copied so that the opening of the Cromford mill marked the beginning of the factory age.
Cromford was powered by a single waterwheel, in common with iron forges, grain mills, gunpowder-makers and breweries, which were increasingly concentrating their machinery in large buildings and powering them with water. Waterwheels were ideal for driving machinery as they gave smooth rotary motion, while the Newcomen and early Watt engines simply moved a beam up and down. But waterwheels needed rivers and suitable sites were fast disappearing. In 1780 Matthew Wasbrough, John Steed and James Pickard, working in partnership in Birmingham, patented a crank and flywheel device and attached it to a steam engine to run a flour mill. James Watt believed the three men had stolen his own idea and, with his colleague William Murdoch, rapidly made his own rotary device – the sun and planet gear – which was patented in 1781. Boulton & Watt (the company Watt had founded with his investment partner Matthew Boulton) now became the country’s prime engine-makers, installing rotary steam engines in mills, workshops and factories.
It is important to understand that these inventions were not happening in a vacuum; they were propelled into being by the forces around them. The British economy was developing apace through more effective organisation, standardisation and production processes; but at each point along the way bottlenecks appeared – such as shortages of charcoal, cotton yarn and water power – that had to be cleared. Key to the period from the 1760s to the 1820s was the intensification of relations between different industries, born out of the contacts between industrialist entrepreneurs as well as the geographical proximity of the industries. Such interaction also emerged from the technologies themselves as the spread of textile machinery, for example, depended on the availability of cheap iron and steel, and Watt’s steam engines depended on high-quality castings. In fact, the making of machine components was a major area of improvement and ironmasters like John Wilkinson, the Darbys of Coalbrookdale, Samuel Walker and the Carron Works in Falkirk gained a reputation for the quality and accuracy of their engineering. And it was the symbiosis between different branches of industry that allowed Watt’s engine to be radically improved as soon as his patent expired.
Around 1779 Samuel Crompton, a Lancashire spinner, weaver and inventor, perfected his spinning mule. Crompton did not patent his machine for fear of infringing Arkwright’s patent, but it was rapidly adopted by the Lancashire cotton industry. The mule, a highly complex hybrid of the jenny and the frame, was the final part of the answer posed by the flying shuttle – how to produce enough high-quality cotton yarn to feed the vast and growing demands of the cotton cloth-making industry. Mules could not only run 1,000 spindles off one device, they could produce the finest yarn at the highest quality. They became the dominant spinning machines in the textile trade for the next 150 years.
The next major technical breakthrough came in iron production. While Darby had shown how to make cast iron in a blast furnace using coke, making wrought iron or bar iron involved a further process that still required charcoal. Iron-forgers tried for decades to find ways round this, and in 1783 Henry Cort from Fareham in Hampshire finally came up with the answer. His method, known as puddling and rolling, allowed forgers to use coke, and finally freed iron production from its dependence on charcoal. Iron production expanded dramatically, and iron could now be put to work in the service of industry.
The demand for mechanisation and power was now reaching into all parts of productive industry, turning cottage crafts into factory-based production. Technically astute engineers moved from one field to another, looking for opportunities. The patent system, for so long a chaotic bear pit, was gradually becoming favourable to inventors as judges began to understand the value of rewarding innovation. Between 1700 and 1740 the average number of patents awarded annually was fewer than five; from 1740 to 1780 the average was nineteen; from 1780 to 1800 this increased to fifty-two.
These figures not only show an upsurge in innovation – and in the opportunities for inventors – but they demonstrate how the culture of invention had been let loose and how the patent system, once used to block invention, provided an incentive for continual improvement. James Watt, for example, managed to get his original patent extended to 1800, but he knew that he had to keep refining his engine because he was competing with other inventors and engineers. A critical momentum of innovation had been reached.
While Watt continued to make ground-breaking improvements throughout the 1780s and 1790s, including parallel motion gearing, a reciprocating engine and the centrifugal governor, the one area that he did not explore was the use of high-pressure steam, which he considered dangerous and unlikely to work. But within months of the expiry of Watt’s patent in 1800 the Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick ran a carriage driven by a high-pressure steam engine up Camborne Hill. In 1804 he cemented his genius by running the world’s first steam locomotive along nine miles of track at the Pen-y-darren i
ronworks at Merthyr Tydfil. Trevithick showed what many had believed: that high-pressure steam could be used safely, and that high-pressure engines would be light enough to be carried by the vehicles they propelled.
In time-honoured fashion, Trevithick’s success led to another major improvement. The rails along which his locomotive ran were, like most trackways, made of wood occasionally topped with iron strips. This worked for horse-drawn wagons but could not bear the weight of locomotives. Cast iron was inadequate too, and the slightest incline proved difficult for engines. Into this potential bottleneck stepped George Stephenson, who combined the talents of engine builder with surveyor, rail-maker and visionary entrepreneur. It was Stephenson who, in 1825, built the Stockton to Darlington line and its locomotives, and who then built the Liverpool to Manchester railway, and who won the 1829 Rainhill trials with the most famous steam engine in history, the Rocket. After 1829 no one doubted that steam locomotion was the wonder of the world and the future of transport.1
So, by 1804 a series of inventors had shown that coal could be used to create mechanical energy: for the first time in history mechanical works could be reliably carried out by machines not powered by human or animal muscle; with cheap and plentiful coal there was no limit to the amount of energy available. Other inventions – the powered loom, the Jacquard device, the self-acting mule, the Fourdrinier paper-maker, gas lighting, the miners’ safety lamp – followed rapidly as the steam-powered mechanisation of production spread into different industries and the conversion to a coal-based industry was completed. Innovations continued to come, but the essential groundwork had been laid in just forty years.
2. Inventors and Inventing
BY 1760 BRITAIN had developed a highly effective agricultural, commercial and manufacturing economy far outstripping its Continental rivals. Yet its growth was still limited by the natural resources available – timber, water, land and animals. As we have seen, these constraints were beginning to break down, particularly through the prodigious use of coal, but the great breakthrough of the next decades was converting coal into mechanical energy, and to use that energy for powering a range of mechanical devices. To do this, Britain needed inventors.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Britain had been behind the Continent in mining and metallurgy, the quality of textiles and a whole range of craft technologies. Ideas, many believed, came from abroad, along with the skills to put them into practice. It was Britain’s acceptance of its own inferiority in these areas that began to change things, through successive governments welcoming skilled refugees from Europe. Flemish weavers, Italian silk-throwers and alum-makers, Huguenot glass-makers, German metallurgists and gun-makers were encouraged to settle in Britain. The 1572 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris, the 1576 Spanish sacking of Antwerp, the Thirty Years War (1618–48), the expulsion of Huguenots from France in 1685 all brought skilled artisans to England. As well as the push of religious persecution and conflict, there was the pull of prosperity. Britain was a growing market for high-quality goods, and with an underdeveloped domestic industrial base immigrant workers could make a good living. In the late seventeenth century British manufacturers like Abraham Darby even visited Europe to lure workers to England. It was this adoption of skills from abroad and the training of artisan apprentices that enabled the country to diversify from the wool trade and work its way to the forefront of technological innovation in Europe.1
There were several reasons why the British carried this off so brilliantly. By the mid-eighteenth century Britain had developed a large pool of skilled workshop labour, working with an increasingly sophisticated set of tools. This pool of workers was continually renewed and was geographically widespread. While we tend to focus on a few brilliant inventors, it was vital that there were able craftsmen in every part of the nation. As most inventors did not build machines for sale but licensed their use, inventions were turned into working machines by skilled mechanics, whose presence throughout the country was an important factor in the rapid spread of technology.
The characteristic British inventor and entrepreneur of the eighteenth century might be called the ‘artisan plus’. These were men who were trained as artisans but were both ambitious and had access to funds for investment. By and large they were not part of the higher social orders with their traditions of public and military service, their social snobbery, and their conservative attitudes. Instead they were a distinct group of independent resourceful folk: some were the sons of craftsmen who had bettered themselves and artisans who had grown up in the trade; others came from commercial merchant backgrounds. These new men formed clubs and associations, like the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and they came together in Nonconformist meetings. What kept these men in industry was often a lack of alternatives. A seat in Parliament or the highest levels of government service required wealth and connections beyond their reach, as did a career in the army or navy; and Nonconformists were still barred from both higher education and government service. In industry or commerce, however, they could become powerful people at local, regional and national levels.
Looking more closely at the most important innovators of the Industrial Revolution we see striking similarities in background and status. Almost all of them had been apprenticed or worked in manufactories. Thomas Newcomen was an apprentice ironmonger; John Kay, loom-maker; Abraham Darby, maltster; Richard Arkwright, wig-maker and barber; Richard Trevithick, mining engineer. James Hargreaves and Samuel Crompton were both cotton spinners, Henry Cort was an iron-maker while James Watt was the son of a shipwright. Of all these inventors only James Watt had any contact with scientific experts in his field, and that came through informal academic networks in Scotland; and of the most significant inventors only Edmund Cartwright, inventor of the powered loom, had a university education. As Bernard Mandeville, one of the most acute observers of the early stages of industrialisation, wrote in 1724: ‘They are very seldom the same Sort of People, those that invent Arts, and Improvements in them, and those that enquire into the Reason of Things: this latter is most commonly practis’d by such, as are idle, and indolent, that are fond of Retirement, hate Business, and take delight in Speculation: whereas none succeed oftener in the first, than active, stirring, and laborious Men, such as will put their hand to the Plough, try Experiments, and give all their Attention to what they are about.’2
If we spread our net wider than this small group, we find much the same social profile, but increased numbers allow us to build a more detailed picture. Recent analysis has shown that inventors were not drawn in equal proportion from every social class; instead two tendencies stand out.3 The first is that while the aristocrats, gentry and clergy contributed little to industrial invention, wealth was a factor. Secondly, the ‘middle’ classes comprising both merchants and capitalists, and shopkeepers, manufacturers and artisans, made up just 25 per cent of the English population but supplied nearly 70 per cent of inventors.
So much for the inventors themselves, but other factors created a climate that helped build the momentum of innovation. One cause was that industrialisation took place in a relatively small geographical area. This area, bounded by Shropshire, Staffordshire, Birmingham, Leicester, extended through Nottingham and Derby, up to South and West Yorkshire and across to south Lancashire, is at most a hundred miles across. Navigable waterways were plentiful and an improving road system, while not always easy to use, was available; a comprehensive network of canals was quickly added from 1761 onwards. Satellite areas such as Newcastle and Durham, central Scotland, South Wales and Cornwall were all readily accessible by coastal shipping as was the major market of London. Political unity and cohesion meant few tolls or tariffs between places of production, supply and consumption. (In France, in contrast, tolls were levied at cripplingly frequent intervals, making long-distance trade extremely difficult.)
Another factor was the financial gain to be won from innovation. We may see these inventions as contributing to a historic chan
ge in society, but the inventors’ overwhelming motivation was financial reward. Either through developing their own business or by licensing or selling their patents, men like Watt, Crompton and Arkwright invented in order to make money. And even though a grounding in, say, metallurgy would seem to push an innovator towards making inventions in that industry, this was often not the case. Once they had acquired sufficient technical expertise, inventors became ‘professional’ and worked across different fields. As the cotton industry expanded more than any other, offering greater financial rewards, it is not surprising that it was here that the most important inventions were made.4
Despite the prospect of financial gains for inventors, a crucial aspect of the innovations of this classic period of the Industrial Revolution was their modest scale. The artisan inventors were not, in the main, supported by large-scale investors and had to work within severe limits. Devices like the Newcomen engine, the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny and frame could be built in a workshop or even the room of a house, while the materials – timber, brass and iron components, oakum and wire – were available to smiths and joiners everywhere at relatively low expense. Indeed the main expense was time; it took Thomas Newcomen around a decade to come up with a practical working engine, while James Hargreaves said that he ‘laboured for six years’ to get his jenny to work. James Watt’s steam engine needed a greater investment in engineering materials and the money was put up by his sole partner Matthew Boulton, while Richard Trevithick had the initial support of two investors, Andrew Vivian and Davies Gilbert.
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