Ideas

by Peter Watson

  The combined effect of factory organisation and technical innovation occurred first in spinning. The point of spinning machines is that they parallel the way humans, with their fingers, increase the tension on wool or cotton staples so as to draw out a continuous thread. One type of machine was invented by James Hargreaves in the 1760s and another patented by Richard Arkwright, a baker by trade. Their devices employed a series of spindles and rollers to gradually build up the tension. A decade or so later, Samuel Crompton invented a machine which performed both the functions of the other two men’s devices and the spinning machine was more or less perfected.8 The important point to take on board is that although Hargreaves and Crompton were inventors, it was Arkwright, the organiser with a nose for finance (who may even have stolen the ideas of the two earlier inventors), who patented the water frame and went on to make a fortune.9 He realised that it was not with wool but with cotton that the future lay, for the growing trade with India was what counted. It had never been easy to spin strong cotton thread by hand and, traditionally, English weavers had woven a cloth in which the weft was cotton but the warp was linen (in the loom the threads of the weft are left stationary, whereas those of the warp are constantly strained as the shuttle leads them to and fro). Arkwright knew that a cotton thread tough enough to be used as warp as well as weft would transform the industry.10

  The first factories were powered by running water, and this is why they were located in the often remote river valleys of Derbyshire–it was only here that the streams could be relied on to have enough water throughout all the year. Children from foundling homes and workhouses provided cheap labour. This was not in itself a new practice–Daniel Defoe had observed Yorkshire villages in the 1720s where women and children spent long hours at spinning machines. The new element was the factories themselves and the brutal discipline they demanded. As things stood, at least the children had what little free time they were given in the countryside. But even that changed when the steam engine took the place of water power at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This made it viable for the factory to move to the source of labour, the town, coal being as plentiful there as in the countryside.11

  The first use of the steam engine was to pump water from mines. (This was an old problem. Evangelista Torricelli had discovered as early as 1644 that a suction pump could not raise water much more than thirty feet.)* The deeper mines, well below the water table, needed to be drained either by bailing out with buckets or with a series of pumps. The first engine to power these pumps was invented by Thomas Newcomen, in the copper mines of Cornwall, around the turn of the eighteenth century. In this early form of engine, the steam which powered the piston was condensed in the cylinder, with the piston being brought back by the suction that resulted from condensation. This worked, after a fashion, but the drawback was that the entire cylinder was cooled after each stroke by the water that was injected to condense the steam. This was where James Watt came in. As a skilled instrument-maker at the University of Glasgow, Watt made some calculations about the efficiency of Newcomen’s machine and began to wonder how the heat loss might be prevented or avoided. His solution was to condense the steam in a chamber that was connected to the cylinder but not part of it. This arrangement meant that the condenser was always cold, while the cylinder was always hot. Despite this breakthrough, Watt’s engine did not function satisfactorily in Glasgow owing to the poor quality of workmanship by the local smiths. Matters were transformed when Watt found much more ‘eminent casters’ in Matthew Boulton’s factory in Birmingham.12

  This was, in many ways, the defining moment of the industrial revolution, the event which coloured so much of modern life. Once steam became the power base, coal and iron became the backbone of industry. In fact, iron technology was already well advanced. Until around 1700, only charcoal could reduce iron ore in the blast furnace. This was where the shortage of wood in England played a pivotal role. Wood remained plentiful in France and so charcoal continued to be used. But in England there was, in the place of wood, a rich supply of coal. Everyone knew this and more than one inventor grasped that one way to reduce iron ore would be to rid coal of its gases, thus converting it into coke, which enabled higher temperatures to be built up more safely.13 This was first achieved around 1709, the ironmasters who made it being Abraham Darby and his family, who managed to keep their secret for more than thirty years.14 The raw iron they produced still needed to be purified, to make it workable, but in time cast iron became, in Peter Hall’s words, the plastic of its day.15

  The agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century also played a part. Viscount Townsend’s new methods of crop rotation, and Robert Bakewell’s innovations in cattle breeding, which vastly improved efficiency, helped push people off the land, destroyed village life and forced the population to the cities–and into the factories.16

  But the industrial revolution was not only, and in fact not mainly, about the great inventions of the time. The long-term change that the industrial revolution brought about was due instead to a more profound transformation in industrial organisation.17 As one historian of this great change has pointed out, the abundance and variety of inventions ‘almost defy compilation’ but they could be grouped into three categories. There was the substitution of machines (quick, regular, precise, unflagging) for human skill and effort; there was the substitution of inanimate sources of power (water and coal) for animate ones (horses, cattle), most notably engines for converting heat into work, opening to man a virtually unlimited supply of energy; and finally, all this meant that man could make use of new raw materials–mainly minerals–which were abundant.18

  The point of these improvements was that they enabled an unprecedented increase in man’s productivity and, moreover, one that was self-sustaining. In earlier times, any increase in productivity had always been quickly accompanied by a population increase which eventually cancelled out the gains. ‘Now, for the first time in history, both the economy and knowledge were growing fast enough to generate a continuing flow of investment and technological innovation.’ Among other things, this transformed attitudes: for the first time, the idea that something was ‘new’ made it attractive, preferable to something that was traditional, familiar, tried and tested.19

  Some idea of the scale of the transformation can be had from the way the cotton industry progressed in Britain. In 1760 (generally regarded as the very beginning of the industrial revolution), Britain imported around 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton. In 1787 that had risen to 22 million pounds and by 1837 to 366 million pounds. At the same time, the price of yarn had fallen to about one-twentieth of what it had been and almost all of the workers in the cotton industry, save for the hand-loom weavers, worked in mills under factory conditions. The rise of modern industry, and the factory system, ‘transformed the balance of political power, within nations, between nations, and between civilisations; revolutionised the social order; and as much changed man’s way of thinking as his way of doing’.20

  The primary reason for this change has been reconstructed by historians and appears to be due to the fact that the earlier village system was unequally mechanised. For example, the weaver’s frame was an effective machine but the spinning wheel required little skill and, according to Daniel Defoe, ‘anyone age four and above could do it’. Because of this, it paid very badly and was treated by women as a secondary occupation–after housework and raising children. As a result, spinning often became a bottleneck in the system. A second shortcoming was that while in theory the weaver was his own man, in practice he often had no choice but to mortgage his weaving frame to the merchant. At times when business was bad the weaver had to borrow money to survive, and his only security was his machine. At the same time, this did not necessarily benefit the merchant because when the good times came the weaver usually worked just hard enough to feed himself and his family and no more. Put another way, when the weaver needed more work the system was against him, and when the merchant needed more product t
he system was against him. There was thus no surplus in the arrangement. It was this (unsatisfactory) state of affairs which led to the factory. The essence of the factory was that it gave the owner control over materials and over working hours, enabling him to rationalise operations which needed several steps, or several people.21 New machines were introduced that could be used by people with little or no training–women and children included.

  For the workers, factory life was nowhere near so convenient. Thousands of children were recruited from the foundling homes and workhouses. William Hutton served his apprenticeship in the silk mills of Derby wearing pattens on his feet because he was too small to reach the machinery. Like the adults around them, children were subject to factory supervision and discipline. This was a new experience: tasks became increasingly specialised, time ever more important. Nothing like this had existed before; the new worker had no means of either owning or providing the means of production; he or she had become no more than a hired hand.22

  This fundamental change in the experience of work became all the more obvious when the invention of steam engines made the factory city possible. In 1750 there had been only two cities in Britain with more than 50,000 inhabitants–London and Edinburgh. By 1801 that had grown to eight, and to twenty-nine in 1851, including nine over 100,000, meaning that by this time more Britons lived in towns than lived in the country, another first.23 The migration to the cities was forced on people–they had to go where the work was–but they were hardly enthusiastic and it is not hard to see why. Apart from being smoky and dirty, with a shortage of open spaces, and with sanitation and water-supply lagging behind the increase in population, the cities were home to epidemics of cholera, typhoid and pollution-induced respiratory and intestinal diseases. ‘Civilisation works its miracles,’ wrote the Frenchman, Alex de Tocqueville, who visited Manchester in 1835, ‘and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.’24 But in the factory city, owners could immediately benefit from new inventions and new ideas, and this too was an important characteristic of the industrial revolution–that it was self-sustaining, intellectually as well as materially. It generated new products–in particular, iron products and chemicals (alkalis, acids and dyes), most of which required large amounts of energy/fuel for their manufacture. Another aspect of this arrangement was that the new industrialism stretched across the world, from the sources of the raw materials to the factories, and then on to the markets. This too stimulated new ideas and new demand for products. To give just one example, it was the developments in the industrial revolution that combined to make tea and coffee, bananas and pineapples everyday foods. According to David Landes, this change in man’s material life was greater than anything since the discovery of fire: ‘The Englishman of 1750 [i.e., on the eve of the industrial revolution] was closer in material things to Caesar’s legionnaires than to his own great-grandchildren.’25

  No less important in the long run, the industrial revolution also widened the gap between the rich and poor, helping to generate class conflicts of unprecedented bitterness.26 The working class became not only more numerous but also more concentrated, and therefore more class-conscious. This change is worth dwelling on for a moment because it was to have an immense significance in politics. Pre-industrial labour was a very different entity from its later counterpart. Traditional peasants had their holdings or their craft shops, and they also had a master, with reciprocal duties (albeit very unequal ones). The industrial revolution, however, replaced the peasant or servant–the man–with the ‘operative’ or ‘hand’. It also imposed a regularity, a routine, a monotony, on work, which had been largely absent in the pre-industrial rhythms of labour, based on the seasons, or the weather.27 (People in pre-industrial times quite often chose to start the working week on Tuesday. Monday was known ironically as ‘Saint Monday’.)

  One reason for the poverty of the working classes, certainly for the low wages they were paid, was because income was diverted to the new business classes, who were investing in the new machines and factories. The industrial revolution did not create the first capitalists, ‘but it did produce a business class of unprecedented numbers and strength’.28 These ‘chimney aristocrats’, as they were called, came to dominate domestic government policy throughout most of Europe in the nineteenth century.

  A quite separate aspect of the industrial revolution was economic. The origin of economics–the discipline–was outlined in the previous chapter. Added to this in Britain was the phenomenon of private savings, which began to accumulate after 1688. The king used these savings to fund war, and in this way a public debt was established. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 as part of this evolution, with merchants and landowners taking a share in the national debt, and drawing interest from it.29 Government loans were paying 8 per cent before 1700, but by 1727 that had fallen to 3 per cent and this too had an effect on the industrial revolution. When interest rates are high, investors look for quick profits, but when rates are low, people are more willing to consider longer-term projects which might, in the future, offer better returns. This is a better climate in which to launch large-scale capital projects, such as sinking mines, digging canals, or building factories. The early factories–in the country–had been of such a scale that single families could afford to finance their construction but, as demand grew, and urban factories snowballed in size, to satisfy an expanding market, larger investment was needed.

  Britain led the way in the industrial revolution, partly because many of the inventions were conceived there but also because the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars held mainland Europe back until around 1815. However, once these other countries achieved a measure of political stability they lost no time in creating their own forms of financial intermediary, in particular the joint-stock investment bank, or the crédit mobilier, designed to fund their large-scale capital projects. Again according to David Landes, the earliest examples were semi-public institutions–the Société Générale in Brussels and the Seehandlung in Berlin. These institutions were particularly effective in funding the development of the railways, ‘which needed money in unprecedented quantities’.30

  A parallel development arose in the schools of science and technology, which fulfilled for the mainland European countries the function of the dissenting academies in Britain (see below, this chapter). The French led the way, first with its École Polytechnique (originally the École Central des Travaux Publics) in 1794. The competitive character of the school–admission by examination only, and with a public ranking on admission, partial completion and graduation–attracted the best students. Graduates who wanted a career in the new industries went on to the Écoles des Mines or the Ponts-et-Chaussées, where they learned applied science and did on-the-job training.31 The École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, designed to teach engineers and business managers, was founded privately in 1829 but was taken into the state system in 1856. These French examples served as models for other countries, rather than the original dissenting academies, because by the end of the eighteenth century the British strategy of ‘learning by doing’, though it had worked well enough to begin with, had now been overtaken by the sheer weight of innovation. More abstract and theoretical tuition was now needed, and in two areas–electricity and chemistry–advances were being made in so many different locations that only in these new schools could students keep up.

  Advances in electricity and in chemistry in particular underpinned many of the new industries which comprised the industrial revolution. Electricity moved ahead after the period dominated by Newton, because it was one of those areas that Newton himself had not spent any time on and where other scientists were not intimidated. People had known that there was such a thing as electricity for hundreds of years, men being aware, for example, that amber, when rubbed, attracted small bodies. It was also discovered in the early eighteenth century that friction–in the form of a barometer shaken in the dark–produced a green light.32 But the first real excitement was generated
by Stephen Gray in 1729 when he was led to a more developed idea of electricity as something that could be sent over large distances. He first noticed that the corks which he put in the end of test tubes attracted small pieces of paper or metal when the tubes (not the corks) were rubbed. By extension he found that even silk loops that led from the tubes right round his garden also had the same property. He had discovered that electricity was something that could ‘flow from one place to another without any appearance of movement of matter’–electricity was weightless, what he called ‘an imponderable fluid’. Gray also discovered something anomalous but basic: electricity could be stored in bodies like glass or silk where it was generated, but it could not pass through them. And, conversely, those substances which conducted electricity could not generate or store it.33