by John Browne
2. Thomas Oliver Selfridge Jr., in David Mindell, Iron Coffin: War, Technology and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 71.
3. Navy Secretary Welles in Mindell, Iron Coffin: War, Technology and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor, p. 72.
4. Currier & Ives was a nineteenth-century New York-based print-making firm. It was one of the most successful and prolific lithographers in the US. The lithograph is inscribed, somewhat inaccurately: ‘The Battle of Hampton roads … In which the little Monitor whipped the [Virginia] and the whole school of rebel steamers.’
5. In the lithograph, the USS Virginia is referred to as the ‘Merrimac’, after the sunken ship from which the Virginia obtained its frame.
6. William Harwar Parker, Recollections of a Naval Officer, 1841–1865 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1985), p. 288.
7. G. J. Van Brunt to Welles, Mar. 10 1862, in Mindell, Iron Coffin: War, Technology and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor, p. 74.
8. Only the Monitors captain was injured during the battle when he was blinded by a shell exploding into his eyes through a slit in the armour.
9. Mindell, Iron Coffin: War, Technology and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor, p. 1.
10. Mary Elvira, Weeks, Discovery of the Elements (Kessinger Publishing, 2003; first published as a series of separate articles in the Journal of Chemical Education, 1933), P.4.
11. Otto von Bismark, Blut und Eisen, 1862.
12. This was the Schwerer Gustav cannon, named after Gustav Krupp, weighing 1,350 tonnes and with a 32-metre-long barrel. In the siege of Sevastopol in June 1942, ‘Gustav’ wreaked destruction on the Soviet naval base. One shot penetrated through 30 metres of earth, detonating inside an underground ammunition store.
13. The return of Alsace-Lorraine doubled the theoretical steel capacity of France, but it struggled to reach this potential. Shortly after the end of the First World War, France suffered a coal shortage as a result of the destruction of mines and wearing out of rails during the war.
14. Hitler said: ‘The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.’ R. Manvell and H. Fraenkel, Adolf Hitler, The Man and the Myth (New York: Pinacle, 1973), p. 141.
15. On the arrival of British and America troops in April 1945 they found that the city had been completely destroyed. To prevent the rise of the Ruhr armament factories, the Allied forces broke up what machinery was left and sent it to neighbouring countries as war reparations. ‘No Krupp chimney will ever smoke again,’ wrote the accountant put in charge of the Krupp factories. As for the Krupps, Alfred Krupp was imprisoned for war crimes and stripped of his wealth, just as his father, Gustav Krupp, had been after the First World War, but was soon released and his property returned to him. Peter Batty, The House of Krupp (London: Secker & Warburg, 1966), p. 12.
16. Robert Schuman, The Schuman Declaration, 9 May 1950.
17. Ibid.
18. In 1957 the Treaty of Rome created the European Economic Community (EEC), or ‘Common Market’. The Maastricht Treaty, signed in 1992, set the EU on the path towards the euro, launched in 1999 and used today by seventeen of the EU’s twenty-seven members.
19. In his memoirs, Jean Monnet, a chief architect of the ECSC, writes: ‘Coal and steel were at once the key to economic power and the raw materials for forging the weapons of war. This double role gave them immense symbolic significance, now largely forgotten … To pool them across frontiers would reduce their malign prestige and turn them instead into a guarantee of peace.’ Jean Monnet, Memoirs (London: Collins, 1978), p. 293.
20. In October 2012 I visited the Zeche Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen for a meeting of the Accenture Global Energy Board, which I chair. Zeche Zollverein is now a museum and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and its iconic shaft 12, built in distinctive Bauhaus style, is known as ‘the most beautiful coal mine in the world’. Zeche Zollverein is typical of the transformation of Western economies from primary and secondary to tertiary industries: having been taken on a guided tour of the coal mine museum, I then spent the afternoon in a conference room on the top floor of the museum.
21. Unity is, however, far from apparent among member states of the European Union today. The global financial crisis of the later 2000s has led to a crisis of confidence among European member states, threatening the global recovery. Political and economic unions are always susceptible to break-up as, in times of stress, national interests strengthen.
22. Half of all iron consumed is used for construction purposes, a quarter is used to make machinery and a tenth to make automobiles. Only 3.3 per cent of iron is used in the oil and gas industry.
23. A detailed account of this period of BP’s history can be found in J. H. Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company, Vol. 2: 1928-1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 206-29.
24. The previous largest semi-submersible platform, used to tap the Åsgard oilfield in Norway, had a displacement of 85,000 tonnes (compared to 130,000 tonnes for Thunder Horse).
25. ‘Building The Big One’, Frontiers, April 2005, www.bp.com
26. In Concerning the Nature of Things, Bragg writes that, in steel, carbon atoms ‘are forced into the empty spaces between [iron atoms]. We can easily see that this may distort the iron crystal, and prevent the movement along a plane of slip’, p. 226.
27. Bessemer’s resolve to produce a superior metal was furthered by his invention of rotary action bullets, the circular motion of which improved their range and accuracy. He had made a small cast-iron mortar to prove his concept by firing shells within the grounds of his Baxter House home, but the cast-iron cannons were too weak to withstand the pressure resulting from the heavier projectiles and often broke.
28. Memoir written in 1890. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 5, Part 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 361-2.
29. Henry Bessemer, Sir Henry Bessemer, F.R.S.: An Autobiography (London: Office of Engineering, 1905), pp. 143–4.
30. Precursors to Bessemer’s process exist, such as the ‘air boiling’ process used by William Kelly in the US to make iron railings years before Bessemer’s invention. However, Kelly did not create a liquid product using only air; his was an extension of an existing process, rather than an entirely new process. As far back as the eleventh-century Song Dynasty in China there are records of partial decarbonisation using a cold-air-blast technique.
31. Throughout the book, inflation is measured using the Consumer Price Index (CPI). www.measuringworth.com
32. Bessemer exhibited the first steel nails ever made at the International Exhibition of 1862. In America, where many houses were built from wood, steel nails dramatically reduced labour time as no holes needed to be bored before the nail was driven into wood. In his autobiography, Bessemer explains how young girls in the Black Country near Wolverhampton no longer had to work in smoky, grimy smithies shaping nails. He writes: ‘I have often felt that if in my whole life I had done no other useful thing but the introduction of unforged steel nails, this one invention would have been a legitimate source of self-congratulation and thankfulness, in so far as it has successfully wiped out so much of this degrading species of slavery from the list of female employing industries in this country.’ Bessemer, An Autobiography, pp. 378–9.
33. Krupp was informed of Bessemer’s process by Richard Longsdon, a brother of Bessemer’s friend and collaborator Frederick Longsdon. The new convertor was kept a secret in Krupp’s works at Bessemer’s request as he was unable to secure a patent for his design in Prussia. So as to disguise the new invention, Krupp’s Bessemer works were named ‘Wheelshop C’.
34. Bessemer had 117 patents to his name, 40 per cent of which were totally unr
elated to the iron and steel industry.
35. Bessemer, An Autobiography, pp. 53–4.
36. Bessemer succeeded the Duke of Devonshire as its second President in 1871.
37. Such a fate is not uncommon among inventors of iron production processes. Dud Dudley was among the first Englishmen to smelt iron ore with coke, rather than expensive and increasingly scarce charcoal. He laid the foundations of many fortunes, but suffered a life of hardship. Henry Cort invented the puddling process for making iron and steel, but also ended his days a ruined man.
38. Carnegie was President of the Institute from 1903 to 1905.
39. Carnegie wrote: ‘I am neither mechanic nor engineer nor am I scientific. The fact is I don’t amount to anything in any industrial development. I seem to have a knack of utilising those that do know better than myself.’ Bodsworth, Sir Henry Bessemer: Father of the Steel Industry, p. 87.
40. Carnegie lost confidence in Frick following the accident, writing that ‘nothing I have ever had to meet in all my life, before or since, wounded me so deeply [as the Homestead incident]’. In 1894 he accepted Frick’s resignation. K. H. Hillstrom and L. C. Hillstrom, The Industrial Revolution in America, Vol. 1: Iron and Steel (California: ABC-Clio, 2005), p. 87.
41. The sale was worth over 2 per cent of US GDP in 1901.
42. Elizabeth Bailey served as Dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s Graduate School of Industrial Administration from 1983 to 1990. She was the first woman to receive a doctorate in economics from Princeton University, graduating in 1972.
43. Andrew Carnegie, The ‘Gospel of Wealth’ and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2006). ‘The Gospel of Wealth’ was first published as ‘Wealth’ in 1889 in The North American Review. The title was changed to ‘The Gospel of Wealth’ when published in London’s Pall Mall Gazette.
44. Carnegie, The ‘Gospel of Wealth’ and Other Writings, p. 1.
45. A statistical measure of inequality is given by the Gini coefficient, where a value of one corresponds to maximum inequality and a value of zero corresponds to total equality. Most countries range between 0.25 and 0.6. Although global wealth inequality has been falling since the 1980s, in America the Gini coefficient has risen from 0.34 in the mid-1980s to 0.38 in the 2000s. The income of the super-rich has risen from twenty times the earnings of the lowest 90 per cent of America in 1980 to eighty times in 2006.
46. Carnegie, The ‘Gospel of Wealth’ and Other Writings, p. 10.
47. David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), p. x.
48. Carnegie, The ‘Gospel of Wealth’ and Other Writings, p. 10.
49. Free university tuition for Scottish students is still the case today in spite of England charging tuition fees of up to £9,000 a year. Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education, ‘The Browne Review’, October 2010.
50. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 313.
51. Chernow, Titan, p. 314.
52. Carnegie’s vanity is exemplified by a story he tells in his autobiography. During the Civil War, he was sent to fix the railway lines between Baltimore and Annapolis Junction which had been cut by the Confederacy. En route, he noticed the telegraph wires had been pinned to the ground by wooden stakes and so called for the engine to stop. He rushed forward to release them, but as he did so the wires sprung up and hit him in the face, knocking him over and gashing his cheek. He writes: ‘with the exception of one or two wounded a few days previously in passing through the streets of Baltimore, I can justly claim that I “shed my blood for my country” among the first of its defenders’. Yet, on closer examination, Carnegie’s story ‘doesn’t bear scrutiny’, writes David Nasaw, his biographer. Carnegie and his crew did not even repair that stretch of railway. ‘As a little man and a foreigner, Carnegie needed to establish his credentials as man and patriot.’ Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (New York: Country Life Press, 1920), pp. 95–6. Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, pp. 71–2.
53. The Frick Collection, housed in Henry Frick’s mansion, is a jewel of a private collection. When I lived in New York, it was never crowded and so I went often to look at the works of the great masters in the unusually peaceful surroundings.
54. The word ‘skyscraper’ was first used to describe tall ships, but by the 1890s it was commonly being applied to buildings.
55. Life, 20 June 1901.
56. ‘Streetscapes: The Flatiron Building; Suddenly, a Landmark Startles Again’, New York Times, 21 July 1991.
57. Edward Steichen also photographed it, while in 1916 French cubist Albert Gleizes painted Sur le flat iron.
58. S. B. Landau and C W. Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper 1865–1913 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 304.
59. Alice Sparberg Alexiou, The Flatiron (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010), p. 152.
60. Joseph Needham and Donald Wagner, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 5, Part 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 278-9.
61. The prodigious output of Chinese steel works was made possible by the invention of the blast furnace, sometime around the first century BC long before its appearance in Europe during the Middle Ages. The blast furnace allows molten metal simply to be tapped out of the furnace and so to be produced on a large scale. Its size is only restricted by the amount of ore and fuel available and the size of the workforce that can tend to it.
62. Donald Wagner, ‘The cast iron lion of Cangzhou’, Needham Research Institute newsletter, No. 10, June 1991, p. 3.
63. When Mao announced the Great Leap Forward in 1958, he called for a 19 per cent increase in steel production in that year alone. To meet the ambitious targets, backyard furnaces were encouraged in which peasants could melt down their pots and pans. By 1959 there were over half a million backyard furnaces in operation, but the wood used to smelt the iron led to widespread deforestation. Moreover, peasants now had little time to tend their crops or the agricultural tools with which to do so. Mao’s misguided reforms resulted in a sudden drop in agricultural output and mass starvation.
64. R. M. Lala, The Creation of Wealth: The Tatas from the 19th to the 21st Century (New Delhi: Penguin Portfolio, 2006), pp. 31, 46.
65. Lala, The Creation of Wealth, p. 27.
66. Ibid.
67. Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 338.
68. In the West, George and Richard Cadbury also believed that the welfare of their workers was integral to the success of their business. In 1878 they chose a rural site outside Birmingham, UK, to which they relocated their confectionary factory and built Bournville, a model village with comfortable and spacious houses, leisure facilities and good transport links. For the Tatas, it was their nationalist vision of India’s development which drove their progressive business practices; for the Cadburys, it was their Quaker faith.
69. Lala, The Creation of Wealth, p. 29.
70. Ibid., p. 183.
71. In ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits’ (New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970), Friedman writes that ‘in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them’.
72. Sen, The Argumentative Indian, p. 335.
73. As a result of not pursuing profit at all costs, J. R. D. Tata, the chairman of Tata & Sons between 1938 and 1991, believed the company had ‘sacrificed 100 per cent growth … But we wouldn’t want it any other way.’ Lala, The Creation of Wealth, p. 200.
CARBON
1. When a firework explodes, the energy released excites the electrons in atoms to a higher energy level. When the electrons fall back down to their original state they release this energy as light. The energy levels that an electron is allowed to move between are specific and different for each atom, so the particles of light, called photons, that are emitted by each atom also have a
specific amount of energy. The colour of a photon depends on its energy, and so atoms of different elements will emit light of different colours.
2. Carbonisation is the process of turning organic matter into almost pure carbon. Firewood is carbonised by heating it in the absence of oxygen.
3. Wood is largely made from cellulose and lignin, molecules which are themselves made from atoms of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Paper is made from wood pulp and some early inks were made from lampblack, a type of soot produced by charring organic matter.
4. Carbon bonds with itself so readily because of the structure of its electron ‘shells’ and the properties of the bonds these electrons form. Its outermost shell contains four electrons, each of which it will readily share with another carbon atom and in doing so form a carbon-carbon bond. This process is repeated across multiple carbon atoms to form long chains or rings. Thanks to the positioning of a carbon-carbon bond relative to other bonds and the atom’s nucleus, they are strong and stable, requiring a relatively large amount of energy to break.
5. In Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, he describes how a versatile carbon atom travels from limestone into tree then into a human brain, eventually ending up as a dot on piece of paper. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table. (London: Penguin Books, 2000, originally published in 1975), pp. 188–96.
6. Gunpowder was traditionally made from a careful balance of charcoal, saltpetre (potassium nitrate) and sulphur roughly in the ratio 10:75:15. Saltpetre is an oxidiser, providing oxygen to enhance the burning of the carbon fuel. According to John Bates, writing in 1634: ‘The SaltPeter is the Soule, the Sulphur the Life, and the Coales the Body of it.’ Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5, Part 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 111.
7. Graphene will be discussed later in the book, in Silicon.