A History of the World

by Andrew Marr

  If it is hard for us today to be sure about the meaning of the changes happening around us, it was just as hard for the Britons of this fast-changing age of markets. Many did not feel particularly free. Gamekeepers with their man-traps, punitive local magistrates, the threat of the naval press-gang, tight religious restrictions constraining ambitious young men – petty tyranny was everywhere. But absolute tyranny had vanished. The law relied on barbarous punishments, but it could also be used by many who were not rich to protect their interests. Parliament could be lobbied, in response to the rising interest in changing laws that stymied change. When inventors and the first capitalists challenged the old order, patent law and parliamentary debate would be the cornerstones of their success.

  There was another key difference from most of the European continent. Alongside better farming, more secure laws and less oppressive government, the British now had a freer press than anywhere else. This had started with the cranking-out of pamphlets and broadsheets full of libels, and the vituperative arguments over religion that plagued the 1600s, but had developed into the nearest thing yet seen to a free market in ideas. Scientists, or ‘natural philosophers’ as they still called themselves, could publish their speculations without fear of the censor. Newspapers carried a mass of information about new systems of farming and newfangled gadgets, as well as the doings of princelings and generals and the prices of commodities. In Britain, arguments about trade policy and finance could be fought out openly.

  Importantly, even though Britain was hobbled by many trade restrictions and poor transport, industry was already in place. It was simply not yet organized into factories. Rich men funded families working with spinning and weaving machines in their Yorkshire cottage homes; in the growing Midland towns and villages, makers of nails, buckles, screws and buttons operated in their family workshops. In the traditional coalmining areas, above all around Newcastle, owners were experimenting with machines as they struggled with the ancient problem of how to keep the deeper mines free of water. As with the tin industry, they had used waterwheels and pulleys as far back as anyone could remember, but were now trying out primitive steam engines.

  In 1679 the French inventor Denis Papin exhibited his ‘steam digester’ at the Royal Society and eight years later had developed a better pressure-cooker and steam pump. Two Devon engineers appropriated his idea, and improved on it. Thomas Savery had made some primitive but ingenious devices including an early steam engine, which was being used by Cornish miners during 1708–14; then, about 1712, a Baptist preacher and engineer called Thomas Newcomen produced his more efficient version. It was slow to take on in the West Country tin-mines, but after he persuaded colliery owners in Warwickshire and Newcastle to give his engines a try, their use rapidly increased in the mining areas of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Staffordshire too. But they seemed to be for just one thing, as suggested in the description that Newcomen gave of his company: ‘Proprietors of the Invention for Raising Water by Fire’. The engines were for clearing mines of water, but they used so much coal they could only be sited right beside coalmines.

  Even at this point, Britain had things other countries had not – inventors, plentiful raw materials, a food surplus; and there were small local outbreaks of ingenuity. But nobody would have predicted the almost volcanic eruption of inventiveness about to take place here, such as had not happened in Italy, Germany, China, France or Japan.

  To look a little more closely at this development, it may be helpful to follow the career of the man who took Newcomen’s invention and changed it into something that would bring power from the coalmines into thousands of factories, onto railway tracks and aboard ships.

  James Watt

  The career of the engineer and engine-inventor James Watt is a classic example both of the limitations of the age and of how those limits could be suddenly and brilliantly breached. Watt’s father was a craftsman, merchant and small-time capitalist. He was based at the Scottish port of Greenock, gateway to Glasgow, where ships arrived laden with tobacco, timber, herring, linens and sugar. Watt senior sold the essentials of shipbuilding, designed a crane for use in the docks, invested in ships and mended the sailors’ instruments. His boy James was bright, if sickly. He was good with his hands, and particularly adept at mathematics.

  The Scotland he grew up in was already known for its high level of literacy and the practical zeal of its universities. It had become formally linked to England only when Great Britain had come into being, three decades before James Watt’s birth, and was still a somewhat awkward and uncertain junior partner in the new nation. When James was nine, North Britons (as Scots sometimes called themselves), as well as Englishmen, had experienced the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. This last throw by the Catholic Stuarts had united Gaelic clans, French and Irish adventurers and Scottish and English Catholics alike. Though ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and his supporters talked of a Stuart restoration, behind this was something more radical: a restoration of the pre-capitalist, aristocratic, feudal order, a true revolution against the New Times. The rebellion reached Derby before the clansmen, worried about the harvest and their families, headed north again. Finally defeated in 1746 by the discipline of a hardened modern army – the Battle of Culloden Moor was more like a nineteenth-century confrontation in the colonies than a fight between well matched opponents – the revolt collapsed. It shattered not New Times but the old ways, the Gaelic and clan world of the north and west.

  For a long time, at least among novelists and romantic poets, the cruelty of the victors and the poignancy of a pre-modern way of life expiring in the heather overshadowed the truth, which was that Culloden was good news not only for England, but for Scotland too. As one Scottish historian has put it, the 1707 Union of the two countries ‘implied a Scotland with expanding horizons and possibilities; growing commerce and trade; the good things in life’;8 success for Prince Charlie would have closed this off. Watt’s life would straddle the best of Scotland and the best of England, exemplifying the new Britain of expanding horizons and possibilities.

  After the uprising, Scottish politics was virtually cancelled. The country was ruled from London by proxies. In Edinburgh there was no royal court to siphon off ambition, as there was across the rest of Europe. So two or three generations of Scots had to look elsewhere for work and excitement. Thanks to its Presbyterian Bible-based religion, Scotland was unusually literate and its four universities were free of the dead hand of the English Anglican establishment. At Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen students were encouraged to think things out from first principles, to challenge received wisdom. The result was a remarkable flowering of new thinking – the famous Scottish Enlightenment.

  Watt, lacking the Greek- and Latin-based education of the English gentleman, was prime material for this development, eagerly sucking in the new ideas being promoted by men who would become friends, such as the pioneering chemist Joseph Black and the philosopher of capitalism, Adam Smith. Before that, though, he had to find himself a living. It was no big leap for him to want to learn how to make mathematical instruments, essential accompaniments to the new scientific learning. And in 1755 it was natural enough for him to make the long, jolting journey south from Scotland to London, to the great stinking metropolis, for his training. But at once Watt came up against an ancient barrier to bright boys in a hurry. The medieval guilds, which still controlled London’s trades, tried to keep out non-locals, and insisted all apprentices serve for seven years. Watt was an incomer anxious to get ahead fast. He wanted his training to be completed in a year, and eventually bought it, but this dodge left him dangerously open to the naval press-gang; writing to his father he complained that they ‘now press anyone they can get . . . unless one be either a Prentice or a creditable tradesman, there is scarce any getting off again’.9 If Watt had been seized for the Navy, he could not have appealed to the Lord Mayor for a reprieve, since he was already evading the apprenticeship system.

  He was lucky, and got back safely to Glasgow,
keen to open his own workshop. But Glasgow, like London, was an old town ruled by royal charter, whose guilds were trying to hang on to their stranglehold. And because Watt had no entrée with the burgesses of Glasgow, the relevant guild, the ‘Hammermen’, refused him permission to open his shop, even though there were no other mathematical instrument-makers in Scotland at the time. Had this been a representative picture of Britain, of a land of marauding press-gangs seizing men from the streets to serve in the Navy, and trade guilds hanging on to their ancient rights to the exclusion of all but their chosen few, then Watt would have had to resign himself to a lifetime of piecework, and nobody would have heard of him today. Or, had the Jacobites succeeded, he would have ended his days in frustration in a backstreet workshop in Glasgow.

  Instead he was saved by the Scottish Enlightenment. Specifically, he was given a job repairing astronomical instruments that had just arrived from Jamaica for Glasgow University. There he built up a workshop, making his own instruments and becoming indispensable to the professors. As a practical man with no classical learning, he would have been merely a hired hand at Oxford or Cambridge. In Glasgow, he was soon regarded by the scientists as their social equal. He opened his own shop in the town and began to study the latest gadgets, including steam engines. In 1763, aged twenty-seven, he was asked to repair a model of a Newcomen engine belonging to the university. Watt mended it, but found it infuriatingly badly made and inefficient.

  The principle was easy enough: the steam went into the cylinder, pushing up a piston. Then the steam condensed back to water, creating a vacuum, which brought the piston down again. It was the up–down motion that drove the pump for the coalmines. The trouble was, most of the steam escaped. How could it be made to work better? Two years on, still puzzling over the idea of ‘latent heat’, a phrase coined by his friend Black – that is, the heat taken in or thrown out during a change of form, as when water boils or ice melts – he suddenly found the solution. It was, at least as he recalled it, a classic Eureka! moment.

  One sunny Sunday morning in Glasgow, Watt was passing an old wash-house (presumably a steamy sort of place) when it suddenly came to him that since steam would rush into a vacuum wherever it was located, he could put a separate tube or cylinder alongside the main cylinder to take the steam and condense it back to water again. So the main cylinder would stay hot, and far less energy would be wasted. The engine would use less coal and make more power. This doubling-up, the separate condenser, may seem a simple idea. But would it have occurred to anyone who was not both interested in scientific theory (as explained by Watt’s university friends) and also a practical instrument-maker with leisure to think and room to tinker? There was a long way to go, and many frustrations, failures, wrong turnings and experimental mistakes to be met with, but Watt’s understanding would transform the industrial scene, first in Britain, then around the world. He took a simple coalmine pump and made it into an engine with universal applications. Watt recalled: ‘I had not walked farther than the golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.’10

  But he could not advance without money, support and the help of other engineers. What he needed next was capital, the backing to allow him to produce prototypes, then engines for sale. Though there was a growing number of private banks in Britain, it was still too early for an inventor to go to his bank manager and hope to be loaned sufficient cash. Most entrepreneurs borrowed from friends, wives or other relatives. Watt’s first backers were his physicist friend Joseph Black and, more substantially, an eager English entrepreneur, one John Roebuck.

  Roebuck, like Watt, was a product of the new Britain. He was a Sheffield and Birmingham chemist who had established a successful ironworks at Carron in Stirlingshire. Its short-range cannon, known as the ‘carronade’, would be used by everyone from the Duke of Wellington to the Imperial Russian army, and later by the new United States. In the past, manufacturing had happened simply where it had sprung up, quite by chance. Roebuck had done things differently. He had started from first principles, asking where there was good water-power, supplies of ore, limestone and coal and good transport links, and had then built his operation from scratch. It happened to be in Scotland, but he imported his key workers from England. His action has been referred to as ‘a decisive change in the structure of industry’.11 Roebuck needed coal for his ironworks, so he had bought a coalfield near by, but found that it suffered from the perennial pre-Watt problem of too much underground water. Hearing of the Watt design, he helped fund an early version, but that one was not strong enough.

  Though he went into partnership with the young engineer, Roebuck himself went bust – an early bank crash was partly responsible – and sold his share of Watt’s invention to another eager Englishman, Matthew Boulton of Birmingham. That city now becomes a crucial part of the story.

  Birmingham had long been a centre for blacksmiths and metal-workers. It had supplied huge numbers of swords for Cromwell’s armies during the Civil War, guns for both sides during the Jacobite rebellion, and buckles and buttons for half the world. But as a town it was a late developer and enjoyed the wonderful bonus of not having a royal charter, so the guilds and craft companies had no hold there, which kept it open to entrepreneurs and commercial adventurers. Dissenters had gathered there, and the city already had a thriving intellectual life. Soon, members of the famous Lunar Society, experimenters such as Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s brilliant grandfather, and the chemist and dissenting radical Joseph Priestley, would assemble on the Sunday nearest the full moon (so that they could get home more safely) to debate chemistry, physics, evolution, the new canals and factories, and much else.12 Birmingham was a long way from London – and all the better for that.

  Among these Lunar Men was Boulton. He was one of those eighteenth-century figures whose energy and breadth of interests compare well with any Renaissance man. His father, another Matthew, had been a successful Birmingham metalworker. Matthew the younger invented new kinds of steel buckles, which rapidly became so fashionable that they had to be exported to France, then imported back again, since clearly nothing so chic could possibly have come from Birmingham. He had gained capital by marrying an heiress, then inherited the family business in 1759 and expanded it hugely to Soho, just north of Birmingham, where he gambled everything on a huge new manufacturing centre, driven by water-power. There he arranged his workmen in designated rooms, depending on which goods were being made there – buckles, watch-chains, sword handles or metal boxes. These items were soon being sold all over Europe, but the factory – for that is what it was – depended still on specialized but manual skills, with a little help from flowing water. What Boulton needed was a more reliable source of power.

  Boulton and Watt lived far apart, but moved in similar circles; both promoted the new canals, the great transport breakthrough of the pre-railway age, and both were in touch with the same natural philosophers and other enthusiasts. Boulton had met Watt in 1767 and shown off Soho to him, trying to encourage the Scot to come to Birmingham. But Watt, constantly setting his steam engine aside for other projects, was slow to respond. It was all of seven years later, after the traumatic death of his wife, that he finally decided to leave Scotland and move south. Had she lived, and had his civil engineering projects in Scotland been more successful, he would have been remembered, probably, as a designer of Highland canals.

  Instead, in 1774 James Watt came south to Birmingham, and one of his coalmine engines – what he called a ‘fire-engine’ – was set up at Soho. It worked, not brilliantly, but well enough. Watt soon went into full partnership with Boulton, whose main business continued to be metalworking. Watt would now divide his time between two equally important tasks. He tinkered and experimented, worked away incessantly at honing his machine, introduced a series of small but crucial improvements. Having the large and experienced Soho workforce of mechanics helped considerably, but one can equally well imagine the same scene being played out on the outskirts of Paris or Hamburg.


  At the same time, however,Watt and Boulton were conducting a long and ferocious legal battle in the British courts and in Parliament itself to protect their intellectual copyright against the ideas-thieves already at work. The notion that an inventor deserved a large share of the profit from his idea, that mechanical devices could make men rich, was a new one. Earlier inventors had often behaved like philanthropists, scattering their thoughts before the press and hoping, mainly, for fame. But patents, and therefore profits, were essential for stimulating the horde of bright and ambitious people who would turn industrial Britain into a kitchen garden of invention. Watt’s struggles with politics and the law were wearisome, and must have seemed fruitless at times, but they were as important to the history of industrialization as was his engine. and these struggles would have achieved nothing in other European countries at the time.

  Boulton, despite having received a second marital windfall (new wife, new fortune), struggled desperately for capital. Many of the new machines were sold to Cornish tin companies, who derived the money to pay for them partly from what they had saved on coal. But sharp practice and protests about monopolies, as well as slow payment for other products sold abroad, caused him serious difficulties.