Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  If we had to give a one-word answer to the question ‘What made Britain uniquely placed to bring about the Industrial Revolution?’ it would be ‘coal’. In the century leading up to the 1760s Britain had built a prosperous economy by combining her traditional wool trade with craft manufacturing. This manufacturing sector made a gradual and historic shift from wood to coal as its primary fuel. At the same time the growth in prosperity and the expansion of towns and cities brought about a building boom and a switch to using coal for domestic heating. Underpinning both rural manufacturing and the growth of Britain’s towns was an agricultural revolution that was also crucially dependent on coal as a source of energy through the manufacture of fertilisers. Britain, by the 1760s, was utterly dependent on coal and was consuming coal in vast quantities compared to every other European nation. It was this dependence, and the presence of coal in every sphere of life, that made the great revolution possible. The breakthrough that saw coal being used to produce mechanical energy could really only have happened in a coal-based economy like Britain’s. Nevertheless it took the enormous determination of a handful of men to bring that historic change to fruition.

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  fn1 British Thermal Units. 3,414 BTU = 1 kilowatt

  III. Power

  ‘We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.’

  THOMAS CARLYLE, 1829

  5. Watermills and Wheels

  THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION brought about the mechanisation of industrial production. Machines were devised to save labour by doing the work of several and sometimes hundreds of men, but these machines needed power to run. Machinery plus power was the magic formula. So what was the major source of industrial power during the heroic age of Watt, Arkwright and Trevithick? The answer is water.

  Between 1760 and 1820 the number of waterwheels in England increased from an estimated 70,000 to 120,000; this was the result of the Industrial Revolution creating machines, mills and factories that ran off a single power source.1 Supplying that motive power from steam engines, although first pioneered in 1781, took time to spread through the manufactories of Britain and, in the meantime, water power filled the gap. In fact, most of the machines of the Industrial Revolution – the spinning frame and mule, the power loom, the blast-furnace bellows and powered forge hammers – were built to run on water power. It took James Watt years to make rotary steam engines run as smoothly and safely as waterwheels, so mill-owners even used steam engines to pump water to power waterwheels.

  Water-powered mills, including old corn mills, are a crucial element in our story because they were prototype factories. Their model of raw material storage, machinery building and maintenance, transfer of mechanical power, purpose-built structures and throughput of work all informed the textile mills that were the basis of the factory system. Water power made Britain ready for the transformation that steam power was to bring. We will therefore look briefly at the history of water power before examining how it was used as the midwife of the industrial economy.

  The earliest known watermills in Britain date from the Roman occupation – both the mill at Ickenham in Kent built around AD 150, and mills at Haltwhistle Burn and Chesters on Hadrian’s Wall dating from the third century, used vertical wheels. A handful of Saxon waterwheels have also been discovered, mostly using horizontal wheels. The first documentary evidence dates from 762 and by the ninth century mills were commonly mentioned in monastic charters. By 1300 there were between 8,000 and 9,000 water-powered corn mills in England with a further 2,000 to 3,000 windmills.2 When the monasteries lost power in the sixteenth century their exclusive rights over milling were taken up by newly built private mills, while in some places the local manor retained milling rights until the mid-nineteenth century.3

  The engineering and technological nous involved in mill building and maintenance should not be underestimated – indeed eighteenth-century industrial engineers were very familiar with mill technology (Watt borrowed the steam governor from a device used on windmills). Most mills diverted natural streams into leats or mill races; streams were occasionally dammed, either with straight or angled weirs (low dams that allow water to flood over), or with a combination of dams and sluices.

  The vertical waterwheel came in three types: undershot, where the stream flows into the bottom of the wheel, which is driven by the force of water; overshot, which feeds water into buckets from above using gravity to turn the wheel, and was used when more power was needed; breast shot, where water comes into the wheel at the midpoint, was used where conditions did not allow for an overshot to be built.4 As well as the type of wheel, size was an important engineering decision, affected by the speed and volume of water and the uses of the mill. Where water gradients were small, large wheels were used – seventeen feet in diameter on the River Tame in Staffordshire and as large as twenty feet in Suffolk. Fulling mills needed smaller wheels than corn mills, and most waterwheels were between ten and fifteen feet before the Industrial Revolution.

  So what did industrial engineers learn from watermills? The gearing and drive systems were typically arranged to send power at right angles and also to speed up the rotation – in corn mills the stones turn faster than the waterwheels. Cams, shafts, wheels, cogs, lantern gears and trips were all employed, as well as offset cranks and striker plates for fulling. Millwrights had to be able to work as wheelwrights, carpenters, turners, stonemasons, builders and smiths; adaptability was a key part of the engineer’s skills.

  As well as setting engineering precedents, watermills influenced later factory design through their internal layout; the upper floors were used to receive and store the raw materials which were hoisted up externally using a lucam (a projecting beam with a winch); the material then flowed through the working processes and out of the lower doors as the finished product. The financial workings of mills were important too; their method of operating through a toll system created a pattern of licence and finance that Thomas Newcomen and Boulton & Watt both followed.

  The influence of watermills became more direct with the building of the first silk factory at Derby around 1702–4. This first effort was unsuccessful but was followed in 1721 by the Lombe brothers’ Derby mill, powered by a twenty-three-feet-diameter waterwheel with a horizontal driveshaft running the length of the building with regular take-offs to the different machines. Other silk mills were built in Stockport, Macclesfield and Congleton in the 1730s to 1750s.

  The use of water power in the iron industry expanded with the increased use of powered bellows for blast furnaces, and hammers for finery forges. Blowing and crushing ore needed power, as did the cutlery and tool-making trades with their use of hammers and grinding wheels. By 1794 there were 111 waterwheels being used by cutlers in Sheffield alone. Other industries using water power, including paper-making, seed-crushing for oil and making gunpowder, all increased in capacity during early industrialisation.

  The increased demand for power increased the number of waterwheels but it also forced mill-owners to look for alternatives. The cotton industry, in particular, expanded rapidly from 1780, and mill-owners found suitable sites more difficult to come by. Early pioneers converted old corn mills or, as at Strutt’s mill at Milford in Derbyshire, reused old iron-making sites. Lancashire was a good location with early mills clustered along Pennine streams at Mottram, Royton, Chorley and the like. But suitable locations soon filled up – at one time there were sixty water-powered mills of different kinds on a three-mile stretch of the Mersey near Manchester – and Lancashire cotton masters had to look to North Wales or the Lancashire coast. By that time Watt’s improved steam engine had become a more attractive prospect, despite its running costs.

  Water power lasted longest at locations with particular characteristics – steady year-round high-volume streams coupled with the inconvenience of being a long way from coal supplies. New Lanark on the Clyde was the
first mill to power the spinning mule by water, while the Quarry Bank mill at Styal in Cheshire, on the River Bolin, powered 9,600 spindles from a thirty-two-feet-diameter, twenty-one-feet-thick breast-shot wheel, installed in 1820. Catrine Cotton Mills on the River Ayr were perhaps the apogee of water power in the textile industry. New wheels were installed at the site in 1827; Sir William Fairbairn wrote thirty-five years later: ‘They have not lost a day since that time, and they remain even at the present day, probably the most perfect hydraulic machines of the kind in Europe.’5

  Water power kept the dwindling wool industry going in the West Country and in rural Wales and Scotland; in fact the water-powered Welsh wool industry grew through the nineteenth century. The Ulster linen industry similarly managed to keep afloat utilising water power.

  However, the main problem with water power in the industrialised textile market was its availability and fluctuation. Unlike the corn mills processing the autumn grain harvest, textiles were produced year round and the industry needed a continual power supply. Water power played a decisive role in the mechanisation of industry but it was part of the organic economy; indeed the boundaries of its expansion demonstrate perfectly the limits of an organic system. Industrialisation could only expand and be sustained by the introduction of motive power based on steam. This was to be the great leap into a new age.

  6. Steam before Newcomen

  THE DEVELOPMENT OF steam power took three distinct stages, each led by one of the great heroic figures of British inventive genius: Thomas Newcomen, James Watt and Richard Trevithick. In view of our analysis that the move from an organic to a steam-powered economy was one of the great watersheds of human history, the importance of these three men can hardly be overstated. But before we get to their stories, we need to look further into the past and see how previous generations and cultures had viewed the possibilities of steam.

  In fact, the power of pressurised steam was well known to people in the ancient world, while in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europeans began to use steam to unlock the power of the atmosphere. These two applications – steam under pressure and atmospheric engines – were to be the driving forces of the Industrial Revolution.

  Pressurised steam had been used to make toys in ancient Greece by the likes of Hero of Alexandria and Ctesibius, and in seventeenth-century Europe it powered fountains and garden ornaments.1 But its application to industrial purposes first surfaces with the career of David Ramsay, a Scot who came to London in 1603 on the accession of the Scottish king James VI to the English throne, and was appointed Groom of the Bedchamber to James’s heir Prince Henry. Ramsay was a clockmaker by profession and a prolific register of patents.2 These included Patent No. 50 of 1631 containing the following inventions – or at least intentions:

  To Raise Water from Lowe Pitts by Fire

  To Make any Sort of Mills to goe on Standing Waters by Continual Moc’on without the Helpe of Windes, Waite or Horse.

  To make Boates, Shippes and Barges to goe against stronge Winde and Tyde.

  There is no evidence that Ramsay made headway in any of these, but the patent application is a milestone because it shows that men were thinking of practical applications for steam beyond fountains and garden ornaments. The hugely wealthy Edward Somerset (later Marquis of Worcester) was another investigator of steam connected to the Stuart court. In 1654 he set up an engineering works at a cannon foundry in Vauxhall. There, in partnership with his colleague Kaspar Kalthoff, Worcester built a large-scale machine following which a 1663 Act of Parliament allowed him to ‘Receive the Benefit and Profit of a Water-Commanding Engine by him invented’ for ninety-nine years. Was this ‘Water-Commanding Engine’ a continually working steam engine? In a 1659 pamphlet Worcester described the machine as follows:

  I have taken a piece of a whole Cannon, whereof the end was burst, and filed it three-quarters full of water, stopping and scruing up the broken end, as also the touch-hole, and making a constant fire under it; within 24 hours it burst, and made a great crack; So that having a way to make my Vessels, so that they are strengthened by the force within them, and the one to fill after the other. I have seen the water run like a constant Fountaine-stream forty foot high; one Vessel of Water rarefied by fire driveth up forty of cold water. And a man that tends the work is but to turn two cocks, that one Vessel of Water being consumed, another begins to force and refill with cold water, and so successively, the fire being tended and kept constant, which the self-same Person may likewise abundantly perform in the interim between the necessity of turning the said Cocks.3

  The steam from the boiler (in this case the enclosed end of a cannon) was released into a tank of water with a narrow pipe, from which water would shoot, pointing upwards. Water would be drained from another tank down into the boiler to keep it topped up; when steam was achieved it could then be released into either of the water tanks and the cycle restarted. It is unlikely that Worcester was able to make the device self-sustaining, nevertheless he is describing the use of high-pressure steam from a cylinder (in this case a cannon barrel) to drive a continuous spout of water. As cylinders form the basis of almost all engines in use in the world today, this was a significant step.

  In 1675 Sir Samuel Morland (1625–95), ‘Master of Mechanicks’ to King Charles, bought the Vauxhall Foundry used by Worcester, which had in the meantime become a sugar factory. Like Ramsay and Worcester, Morland is one of those people who inhabit the byways of history but who deserve much greater interest. For it was the likes of Morland who began to combine contemporary knowledge about the natural world with an innate desire to make things. He devised and built adding and trigonometry calculating machines – including one for pounds, shillings and pence – metal fire hearths, barometers, a machine for weighing anchors, water pumps and, central to our story, both an internal combustion chamber and a steam-driven pump. A patent was granted to Morland in March 1674, which stated: ‘We are fully satisfied [that the apparatus] is altogether new and may be of great use for the clering of all sortes of mines, and also applicable to divers kinds of manufactures within our dominions.’4 The state papers from 1682 tell us that: ‘Sir Samuel Morland has lately shown the King a plain proof of two several and distinct trials of a new invention for raising any quantity of water to any height by the help of fire alone.’5

  It was long doubted whether a machine was ever built, but in 1936 H. W. Dickinson, James Watt’s biographer, discovered a sketch in the diary of the eminent seventeenth-century MP, lawyer and biographer Roger North (1653–1734). While the sketch is frustratingly vague, and North’s accompanying description shows that he was recalling something he had seen without much understanding of exactly how the machine was working, it is the earliest record of steam from a boiler being used to move a piston in a separate cylinder from the boiler. It is also the first mention of a self-acting valve gear – the falling bar being used to ‘shut out the steam . . . by a stop cock’. However, there is no indication of how the downward plunge of the piston was achieved after the steam was shut off, and there is no record of anyone building directly from Morland’s design, which was probably unknown to later inventors.

  Morland took the work on pistons a stage further by exploding a small charge of gunpowder in a cylinder in order either to force a piston to move, or to create a vacuum that would suck a piston in; Christiaan Huygens was experimenting with that idea at about the same time. Neither of these were steam-powered devices, but their use of a moving piston in a cylinder was important to the story of steam.

  All these machines used steam under pressure. And while most of us would now assume that this was the simplest and most obvious way of harnessing its power, this wasn’t how steam was first used in engines. In fact the world had to wait until 1801 for Richard Trevithick to build a full-scale working engine powered by pressurised steam. In the meantime a different characteristic of steam was employed in the engines that powered the early Industrial Revolution.

  These were static engines
, driven by the effect created when steam is rapidly condensed, or turned back to water. These so-called atmospheric engines worked on the basis that, firstly, nature abhors a vacuum, and secondly that the atmosphere has weight. The third premise was that, when steam condenses, the volume of water it makes is around 1,800 times smaller than the volume of the steam, thereby creating the possibility of a vacuum. The knowledge of these fundamentals came not from those interested in building mechanical devices for entertainment or decoration but from philosophers observing natural phenomena.

  It was an article of faith among medieval philosophers that the universe was full of God’s creations, and therefore a vacuum could not exist. This carried the stamp of classical authority, from Aristotle’s explanation of how water pumps work: if you attempt to create a vacuum it will become filled with water and this will enable water to rise. But then, in 1641, engineers working at the villa of Cosimo de’Medici in Florence created a vacuum, which they planned to use to pump water from a well fifteen metres deep. They expected the water to travel up a long pipe to fill the vacuum they had created in the upper chamber. But however much they tried, the water would not rise more than ten metres. The men sought the advice of Galileo, by then living at Arcreti near Florence. The elder statesman of science was mystified too, but after his death in 1642, his pupil Evangelista Torricelli decided to investigate the problem.